MASTERARBEIT
Titel der Masterarbeit „The Politics of Football: Radical Nationalism and Discrimination in the European Football. Case Study: Ukraine“
Verfasser Pavlo Klymenko
angestrebter akademischer Grad Master (MA)
Wien, 2013
Studienkennzahl lt. Studienblatt: A 067 805 Studienrichtung lt. Studienblatt: Individuelles Masterstudium: Global Studies – a European Perspective Betreuerin / Betreuer: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Stefan Zahlmann, M.A.
MASTERARBEIT / MASTER THESIS
Titel der Masterarbeit /Title of the master thesis The Politics of Football: Radical Nationalism and Discrimination in the European Football. Case Study: Ukraine
Verfasser /Author Pavlo Klymenko
angestrebter akademischer Grad / acadamic degree aspired Master (MA)
Wien, 2013
Studienkennzahl : A 067 805 Studienrichtung: Individuelles Masterstudium: Global Studies – a European Perspective Betreuer/Supervisor: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Stefan Zahlmann, M.A.
“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”
George Orwell: ‘The Sporting Spirit’
“Football is only a game. That is the most outrageous nonsense of the lot. Football is a science, it’s an art, it is war, ballet, drama, terror and joy all rolled into one.”
Tom Utley
Abstract
Abstract English
The work presents a complex investigation on racism and radical nationalism in the European football. A historical comparative analysis of the issue in Western Europe is complemented by an emblematic for Eastern Europe case study on Ukraine. The author employs social constructivist approach to analyze the roots and causes of the problem, factors contributing to the dominance of radical nationalists in football across Europe and the performance of national identities at the stadiums. The presence of racism in football is traced back to the early beginnings of the game but the author objects the view that football itself is inherently divisive and argues in favor of instrumental approach where the game can either foster competition and enforce divisions or contribute to community building and promoting diversity depending on its use. The author suggests that negative developments in the European football such as racism should not be solely attributed to the minority of hooligans but reflect larger tensions in respective societies. The dominance of radical nationalist groups in Ukrainian football is attributed to the activity of political organizations who recruit members at the football stadiums as well as transfer of practices from fan cultures of the neighboring states and Western Europe. The author suggests, that in order to tackle racism and radical nationalism in the European football the combined efforts from the fans themselves, football clubs and regulatory bodies are necessary.
Abstract German
Diese Arbeit präsentiert eine komplexe Untersuchung von Rassismus und radikalem Nationalismus im europäischen Fußball. Eine vergleichende historische Analyse dieses Problems in Westeuropa ist ergänzt durch ein emblematisches Fallbeispiel aus der Ukraine. Der Autor verwendet einen sozial konstruktivistischen Ansatz um die Wurzeln und Ursachen des Problems, die Faktoren die zur Dominanz der radikalen Nationalisten im Fußball in ganz Europa beifügen, und die Darstellung nationaler Identitäten in den Stadien zu analysieren. Rassismus im Fußball ist von seiner frühen Entwicklungsphase an festzustellen, aber der Autor wendet ein, dass Fußball an sich entzweiend ist und spricht sich für einen instrumentalen Zugang aus, bei dem das Spiel, je nachdem wie es benutzt wird, entweder Konkurrenz stärkend und spaltend wirkt, oder zur Gemeinschaftsbildung beitragen kann und Diversität fördert. Der Autor schlägt vor, dass negative Entwicklungen im europäischen Fußball wie Rassismus nicht alleine im Zusammenhang mit der Minderheit von Hooligans in Verbindung stehen, sondern größere Spannungen in den jeweiligen Gesellschaften wiederspiegeln. Die Dominanz von radikalen nationalistischen Gruppen im ukrainischen Fußball steht im Zusammenhang sowohl mit den Aktivitäten von politischen Organisationen, die Mitglieder in den Fußballstadien rekrutieren, als auch mit dem Transfer von Praktiken im Bereich von Fan Kultur der Nachbarstaaten und Westeuropa. Der Autor meint, um das Problem von Rassismus und radikalem Nationalismus im europäischen Fußball zu lösen, sind gemeinsame Anstrengungen von Fans, Fußballklubs und regulative Behörden notwendig.
Table of contents
List of Abbreviations…………………………………………………………………………….i 1. Introduction ...... 4 1.1. Research Question, Theoretical Base and Methods ...... 8 1.2. Structure ...... 10 1.3. State of the Art ...... 11 2. The History of Racism and Radical Nationalism in European Football ...... 16 2.1. Nature of the Game – Identities at the Extreme ...... 21 2.2. European Football since 1960s: Commercialization, Globalization and Counter- movements ...... 27 2.3. Hooliganism and Racism ...... 35 3. Case Study: Radical Nationalism in the Ukrainian Fan Scene ...... 44 3.1. Interethnic Relations and Tolerance in Ukraine...... 50 3.2. Radical Nationalism in the State and Society ...... 55 3.3. Racist Incidents and Display of Discriminatory Symbols in Ukrainian Football ...... 62 4. Conclusion ...... 72 Appendix 1……………………………………………………………………………………79 Appendix 2……………………………………………………………………………………80
List of Abbreviations
DC – Disciplinary Committee FA – Football Association FARE – Football Against Racism in Europe FC – Football Club FFU – Football Federation of Ukraine FIFA – International Federation of Football Associations OUN-UPA – Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Ukrainian Insurgent Army UEFA – Union of European Football Associations UN – United Nations UPL – Ukrainian Premier League
i
1 Introduction
Football is arguably the most popular game in the world attracting more than a billion people worldwide who play it, watch it and support their teams at the stadiums. This statement hardly requires any proofs, but the usual arguments employed include the fact that International
Federation of Football Associations (FIFA) has more members than the United Nations1 and the television audience attracted by the FIFA World Cup finals on different accounts equals to around billion people worldwide.2
Most importantly, football is not just a game but the reflection of society, where the relations of race, class, gender, sexuality and national identities are reconstructed and manifested. The global game is closely linked to politics exercised institutionally as well as spontaneously at the football stadiums. From the very beginning of football in Britain and especially since the spread of live television broadcasting, the game of 22 people with a leather football has been increasingly
1 FIFA. FIFA’s Member Associations (2012). United Nations. UN at a glance (2012). 2 FIFA. Almost half the world tuned in at home to watch 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa. (2011). 4
Introduction
transformed from an entertainment into political act. Professional football clubs gathered thousands of loyal supporters who considered their team as an integral part of their identity.
National teams’ competitions fostered nationalist feelings among those who watched their fellow countrymen playing against other national team. The major sporting and especially football events were extensively used throughout the last century by various rulers and dictators to consolidate the power and gain international legitimacy and credibility. Currently, football is not only one of the major global sports, media events, entertainments and businesses, but most importantly it is a passion for millions of active supporters who cheer for their teams at the stadiums, at times far too passionately.
Contemporary European football is marred by racism and discrimination manifested at the terraces as well as at the pitch and in the governing institutions. Racist chants, banners, banana throwing and other discriminatory abuse may be found all over Europe from the highest professional leagues to the lowest amateur ones. These facts challenge not only the traditional values of sport such as fair competition and fair play but also pose danger to the fundamental human rights.
The origins of racism may be found in the European history of colonialism, when the ‘non- white’ peoples were declared to be inferior to the ‘civilized’ Europeans. In the course of the 20th century with the development of the fundamental human rights discourse, racist theories were proven to be wrong and inacceptable in the public domain. Nevertheless, racist ideas are still widely present in some sections of society in many states worldwide.
Football is usually perceived as a game, although global and increasingly multicultural but still existing in the domain of entertainment. At the same time it is not only the performance of players on the pitch watched by spectators on television but also by the audience at the stadium
5
Introduction
which presents an interesting field of research. I would argue that the spectators at the stadiums during a football match, or football fans are different in a number of ways from the audience at other sport and live entertainment events. Apart from the nationalist feelings incited by national teams’ performance in the audience who watch the matches on television, there exists a special subculture among people who regularly attend the stadiums. The people who regularly visit football matches to support their team are diverse but nevertheless may be grouped into several categories. This categorization will be extensively used throughout the thesis so I would like to explain the meaning I ascribe to these categories.
The first and usually the most numerous category is regular supportersor fans, consisting of various age groups, genders (although still predominantly male) and political views which are rarely demonstrated at the football stadiums. Their behavior is similar to the audience of other sporting events or even different visual arts such as theatre or cinema. They come to domestic matches of their team individually or in small groups of friends and family primarily to watch the game and ‘performance’ of players on the pitch.
Another category I am going to use is active supporters. They occupy traditionally the places behind the goals, mostly well organized in groups and support their team both at domestic and away matches. Active supporters organize different performances at the terraces, produce banners and choreographies and sing or chant to support their team during the whole match.
This category include subculture groups of so called ultras – organized groups who are interested primarily in supporting their team with different audio and visual means and football hooligans who are interested primarily in physical confrontation with the hooligans of the opposing teams before or after the match either in spontaneous or pre-arranged fist fights. Multiple ultras and hooligan groups supporting the teams in the given national league make up a fan scene.
6
Introduction
Other concepts used in this work that require definition are racism, discrimination and radical nationalism in sport. I am going to rely on the definition of racism and discrimination in sport provided by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in their recent report of 2010.
They acknowledge the complex nature and manifestations of the phenomena and identify it as
‘…racist abuse of migrant or ethnic and religious minority athletes, coaches or officials on the field, in the dressing rooms, on the training ground or in other areas of sport practice’.3
To specify some examples, the chanting and abuse might be of racist, xenophobic,
Islamophobic, Anti-Semitic, Anti-Roma or sexist, homophobic nature. The incidents might target also other participants of the sporting event such as spectators, fans, officials on the pitch and clubs representatives. Along with verbal or physical abuse, the visual propaganda might appear such as racist banners, symbols and codes, dissemination or discriminatory or xenophobic literature and symbols of neo-Nazi and radical nationalist political organizations.
Radical nationalism in football has to be distinguished from the festive ‘party nationalism’ of flag-waving and face-painting during the large sporting events or the everyday ‘banal nationalism’
– a concept coined by Michael Billig back in 1995 to explain the day-to-day representations of the nation which are often taken for granted.4 Radical nationalism in football may be characterized as planned manifestation of symbols of nationalist political organizations, slogans and chants which propagate intolerance and discrimination. Organized groups of active supporters may be members of a political organization or movement purposefully demonstrating their ideological views at the stadiums to recruit new members and propagate racist and xenophobic ideas.
In my master thesis I will analyze the reasons for racist behavior and dominance of radical nationalist ideology in the Ukrainian fan scene. The emphasis of my research lies on the structure
3 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, (2010): p. 13. 4 Billig, M. Banal Nationalism. (London 1995). 7
Introduction
and composition of the audience at the football stadium as an integral part of society reflecting its structures and attitudes in a concentrated form and in circumstances of high emotional tension.
I also find necessary to mention the limitations of my research which include the emphasis on the visual and practical representations of racist and radical nationalist discourse in Ukrainian fan scene, although put in context of the European developments and theoretical framework. I will not deal with fundamental theoretical questions of the nature of racism and discrimination in societies but relying on the extensive literature on these issues I will focus on their interference and representation in the European football and Ukrainian fan scene in particular. Historicizing the problem at the beginning of my paper, I will then concentrate on more recent developments and possible prospects for change of the situation.
I decided to focus my research on racism, discrimination and radical nationalism in the
European football for several reasons. My personal interest in the problem derives from the fact that I am involved in monitoring of racist incidents, hate crime and activity of the right-wing groups in Ukrainian football. I participate in design and implementation of public and educational campaigns and activities against racism and discrimination promoting diversity and tolerance in football and society. Therefore, my position as a researcher may be biased by personal activist involvement and oriented toward practical implications of the research.
Nevertheless, I will try to ground my research on a methodological base which will allow testing the findings.
1.1. Research Question, Theoretical Base and Methods
The research question guiding my study is: What are the factors contributing to the continuous racist incidents and presence of radical nationalists in the European football?
8
Introduction
To answer this question I will examine different circumstances which might contribute to the prevalence of racist and nationalist views among the active supporters. In the course of my research I will examine the following set of theoretical, practical and social questions:
- Is there something inherently divisive or nationalist in the game itself?
- How social relations are manifested at the football stadiums?
- What is the relationship between football supporters and nationalism?
- May racist incidents occurring in football be regarded as marginal provocations by football
hooligans or they reflect deeper problems of society?
- How organized are racist groups in football?
- What links do right-wing political parties and movements have with football fans?
- May radical nationalist groups in football be regarded as counter-movements to
internationalization and globalization of football?
I will use a case study, investigating racism and radical nationalism in Ukrainian fan scene. I would like to examine how racism and discrimination are manifested in Ukrainian football, by whom and which forms they take at the stadiums. Also I am going to investigate the activities of the right-wing political groups and parties at the football stadiums.
This will help me to develop my argument:
The social relations, identities and hierarchies existing in societies are reproduced and brought to the extreme at football stadiums. Racism, discrimination and prevalence of radical nationalist groups in football cannot be solely attributed to extremist elements but reflect the tensions of societies at large.
I will take social constructivist approach and use Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism to look at how identities are constructed in football and society. I am also going to use different theories on sport and football in particular in the social sciences.
9
Introduction
To test my hypothesis I will employ a set of scientific methods. I am going to make a historical comparison of situations with racism and discrimination in the European countries to understand the scope of the problem in European football. To test my hypothesis I will make a case study on Ukrainian fan scene and use personal field research. In order to support my statements I will use quantitative analysis of primary (monitoring) and qualitative analysis of secondary sources.
1.2. Structure
In the first chapter I am going to proceed with the actual state of the art in the field, reviewing available literature to date dealing with issues of racism, nationalism and anti-racism in European football.
The second chapter will be dedicated to the historical account and comparative analysis of racism and discrimination in European football. I will analyze secondary sources describing the problem both in Western and Eastern Europe. I will discuss is there a difference between the situation in different countries and why Eastern European football is affected by increasing activity of right-wing groups inside the stadiums.
In this chapter I will also discuss how identities are constructed in football and how the atmosphere of the football stadium brings those identities to the extreme. I will try to figure out what is specific about the construction and performance of identities in football and how they are manifested. In this subchapter I will also discuss the concepts of nation, nationalism and their link to football. In the last subchapter I will examine the globalization of football and structural changes occurring in the game in the last decades. I will discuss if the radical nationalist groups in
10
Introduction
football may be interpreted as a sort of ‘negative’ social movements or counter-movements to globalization.
In the third chapter I will try to analyze the reasons for prevalence of radical nationalism in
Ukrainian fan scene and how this corresponds to the possible explanations provided in the second chapter. I will look at how nation-building process and state nationalism contributed to the problem; analyze monitoring data to understand how racist groups mark their presence at the stadiums and what is the link between political parties and movements and football fans. I will rely on the findings of my field research and primary sources. The results of my research will be discussed in the conclusion.
1.3. State of the Art
Football as a subject of academic research in social sciences emerged relatively recently. In the last several decades many books has seen light covering the interplay of sports, politics, identities and globalization. Naturally, in these accounts football occupies a prominent place. In my research I have tried to focus on the relevant literature exploring in depth the history of football, race, identities and social relations reconstructed in the game. Among the most prominent examples of the complex analysis of football as a global game and social phenomenon, are the books by David Goldblatt ‘The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football’ and ‘Gaming the
World’ by Andrei S. Markovits and Lars Rensmann. Goldblatt’s almost thousand-page study of how football emerged from the British modernity, spread around the world in the strands of imperialism and colonialism, industrialized and later globalized, was invaluable for my research.
This account covers almost all aspects of the game in all regions of the world, including not only the developments in the sporting part of it but also the evolution of audience and football fans,
11
Introduction
revealing the linkages between social structures of corresponding societies and their reflection at the stadiums.
Markovits and Rensmann have focused on sports in general in its different representations in
Europe and the United States of America. They have described the structural processes occurring in sports such as industrialization, commercialization, and globalization of sports together with the counter-movements and internal tensions involving the nationalist and localist oppositions.
Their focus was more on cultural and political aspects of sport, such as identity formation and post-industrial developments in sports and society. The main argument of the book holds that although sport cultures, such as that of football, were and will remain ‘frozen spaces’5based on localized collective identities, they also represent drivers of cultural globalization and cosmopolitanism and constantly meet resistance from conservatives and nationalists particularly in the European fan cultures.
The available literature which tackles specifically racism and discrimination in football is focused on Britain, Germany and Italy, while some authors were trying to address these issues at the European level comparing situations at different Western European countries.
The two probably most influential explorations on the place and impact of the concepts of race, nationalism and identities in football are those of Les Back, Tim Crabbe and John
Solomosin ‘The Changing Face of Football’ and Jon Garland and Michael Rowe in ‘Racism and
Anti-Racism in Football’. Back and his colleagues explore the manifestations of racism in Britain, showing which forms it took and still takes in the game and around it. The authors oppose the conventional coupling of racism with hooliganism and show multiple other ways racism may be
5 Markovits & Rensmann. Gaming the World: How Sports are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture. (Princeton, 2010): p. 29. 12
Introduction
conceptualized. They draw on many examples from the English Premier League and interviews with players.
Garland and Rowe provide a historical account of the performance of black and minority players in Britain since the end of nineteenth century until the present days and reveal multiple forms of racism to which they were subjected. Authors emphasize that along with the most visible and obvious forms of racism such as direct verbal abuse of players by the fans, there are multiple less obvious examples such as nicknames given to black players that reproduce racialized stereotypes. In this book they also examine forms of resistance and anti-racist campaigns appeared as a response to growing racist abuse in England in the 1980s and 1990s. They point at the difficulty of definition of racism because of the multiple motives, circumstances and forms it takes depending on the situation.
The issue of racism and discrimination in football has received considerable attention in the academia during the last decade producing a number of currents and academic debates. Daniel
Burdsey in his edited volume ‘Race, Ethnicity and Football: Persisting debates and emergent issues’ has collected a number of relevant debates and presented his view on the need to reconceptualize the current research on racism and discrimination in football, taking it away from the conventional view that the overt forms of racism are decreasing to the understanding of multiple different forms in which the problem manifests itself today.
Christos Kassimeris in his books ‘European Football in Black and White: Tackling Racism in
Football’ and ‘Anti-Racism in European Football: Fair Play for All’ summarized the debates around the issue of racism and discrimination and provided his own historical account of the origins, circumstances and responses to the problem.
13
Introduction
Daniel Kuhn in his book ‘Soccer vs the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics’ has showed how politics at different levels was interlinked with football. His account is deeply personal and enriched with detailed examination of activist involvement in the global game. He traced how individual athletes’ activism and institutional politics was involved throughout the history in different parts of the world. Kuhn’s book is important for examining different grass- root initiatives trying to bring positive change to the game itself and fan culture.
Football hooliganism is probably one of the sides of football which received the most attention from social scientists. From the multiple books and authors who tried to explain and examine the nature, emergence, reasons and policing of football hooliganism, I would distinguish the works by Cornell Sandvoss ‘Football, Television and Globalization’, Anastassia Tsoukala
‘Football Hooliganism in Europe: Security and Civil Liberties in the Balance’ and Ramon Spaaij
‘Understanding Football Hooliganism’. Sandvoss looks at the football fandom as phenomenon in context of modernity, post-modernity and consumption. He studies how football audience is formed and what attracts so many people to follow the football matches. Tsoukala looks more precisely at the history of football hooliganism and policing and the evolution of academic theories on this phenomenon. Ramon Spaaij looks at the identity formation of football hooligans on the example of six European football clubs and tests different scientific hypotheses explaining the phenomenon.
For different reasons, football in Ukraine has received considerably less attention in the academia and social sciences in particular. There are currently no academic accounts on racism and radical nationalism in the Ukrainian football. Therefore, my research for the case study was based on primary sources such as ‘Hateful’ monitoring report prepared by Football Against
Racism in Europe network (FARE) which documented racist and discriminatory incidents in the
14
Introduction
Ukrainian and Polish football from 2009 to 2011; as well as several reports and studies on tolerance, racism and radical nationalism in Ukraine produced by experts for different NGOs.
These studies include Ghosh Mridula ‘Diversity and Tolerance in Ukraine in the Context of
EURO 2012’ and Kobzin and Chernousov ‘Intolerant activities and organizations in Ukraine.
Results of a Sociological Research’. The given works are trying to analyze general reasons for emergence and activity of intolerant and radical nationalist organizations in Ukraine.
15
2 The History of Racism and Radical
Nationalism in European Football
To tell the history of football means to tell the story of the English game. This is not to say that racism or other forms of discrimination first appeared in England or characteristic to it alone but just to understand the social circumstances in which the game that later became global was invented and evolved. As the place where football emerged in its modern form, England has always been the trend setter in many respects, and not only regarding rules or styles of play. The hooligan violence that sprung in the 1970s is generally known as the ‘English disease’, right wing political parties have first used the football crowds as their recruitment ground there as well the first anti-racist campaigns and grass-root fan initiatives emerged in England.
16
The History of Racism and Radical Nationalism in European Football
First practiced and developed in the environment of the British public schools6 in the nineteenth century to teach children of aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie the discipline and athleticism through the team sport. At that time the place of football in the British culture was far from unchallenged. The ‘noble’ sports such as rowing or cricket as well as rugby attracted the attention of the gentlemen. It is only to the end of the 19th century when football has spread from the public schools to become a real popular game.7The urban masses of industrial proletariat embraced the game in all corners of the country. What has first been an invention and occupation of the gentry became played and watched by the working class who now experienced the separation of the working hours and leisure time on Sundays to play and watch their mates playing on the pitch in numerous parks and specially created football fields.
The working class welcomed professionalization of the game in 1880s on the contrary to the bourgeoisie who still praised amateurship.8 Playing football professionally was a good alternative to working in the factory and the simple rules and accessibility of the game for everyone made its spread extremely rapid. The influx of players from the working class neighborhoods made it also more popular to watch the matches which gathered whole districts.
The dominance of the British Empire in the world in the 19th century made its sports including football spread rapidly to numerous colonies. Acceptance of the traditional British sports by the elites in the colonies helped to solidify and extend the rule of the Empire by means of what we now might call the soft power.9 Playing in the games of their colonizers, people symbolically accepted their rule on the one hand, but on the other hand – the competitiveness and equal rules for everyone gave the opportunity to challenge the colonizers at least on the
6 Goldblatt, D. The Global History of Football (2006): p. 112. 7Ibid. 8 Kuhn, G. Soccer vs the State (Oakland, 2011): p. 15. 9Bairner, A. Sport, Nationalism and Globalization: Relevance, Impact, Consequences (2008): p. 44. 17
The History of Racism and Radical Nationalism in European Football
playing field. It is probably hard to deny what meaning has the victory of the Indian team in cricket, New Zealand team in rugby or any other team in football over the English team.
Football spread not only with the formal instruments of the imperial rule but also travelled together with British workers wherever they went. The British dominance in industry and commerce was unquestioned at that time and one could find factory owners and large numbers of workers almost all over the world. In every dock, city or town they went the workers would always take the football with them to spend their free time in a usual manner. The end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century saw the emergence of professional football clubs in places as diverse as Moscow, Milan or Rio de Janeiro.10The game has fast become popular in many countries of the world for various reasons. It was easy to understand the clear rules, not much was needed to play it and it provided opportunities for socializing while watching others playing a game.
As Garland and Rowe noted in their book, by the end of 19th century football represented not only a physical exercise and entertainment for the masses but also was regarded as embodiment of the British national character and moral values.11 The street, factory or district clubs and national team ought to represent the whole community which was overwhelmingly white at that time. The victories and success in sports such as football was seen as confirming the existing racist theories of the time – the imaginary superiority of the white colonizers over the peoples of
Africa or Asia. Apparently, the emergence of first black professionals in the English game challenged this view and subsequently the players were met with all the arsenal of racial prejudices.
10 Bairner, A. Sport, Nationalism and Globalization: p. 45. 11Garland & Rowe. Racism and Anti-Racism in Football: p. 27. 18
The History of Racism and Radical Nationalism in European Football
Vasili12 describes the faith of the first black professional football player in England – Arthur
Wharton in the end of 1880s who was forgotten by the sport scientists and generally absent from the books on history of football despite his achievements in the game. Wharton and subsequent black players who played for the English clubs throughout the first part of the 20th century were continuously subjected not only to bigotry and insults from the stands but also to other forms of discrimination.13 They had significantly less chances to be selected to play for major clubs and occupy managerial positions. Racial stereotypes were widely present at different levels of the game. The racialized beliefs about black players were extensively spread among the public at that time:
‘Black players might be tricky, but lacked ‘bottle’ and wilted under close marking and heavy tackling; they gave up too easily; couldn’t play in cold weather; or lacked the necessary discipline for top-level training’14
Some of these stereotypes remain widely spread in the European football even until today although rarely voiced in public. Although bigotry, racial insults and banana throwing remain visible in many parts of Europe at the football stadiums today, the more elusive forms of racism such as institutional discrimination or racialized stereotypes may be considered as main problems in England.
While racism experienced by black footballers in England is quite straightforward and was based on the wider social acceptance of pseudo-scientific racist theories, the relationship between football and nationalism is slightly more ambiguous and problematic. The most radical scientists like Eric Hobsbawm go as far as to argue that football evokes chauvinist tendencies more than any other social phenomenon.15 Sometimes such claims are hard to argue against.
12 Vasili, P. The First Black Footballer: Arthur Wharton, 1865-1930 – An Absence of Memory. (London, 1998) 13Garland & Rowe: Racism and Anti-Racism in Football. p. 37. 14 Ibid: p. 41 15Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) quoted in Kuhn, D. Soccer vs the State (Oakland, 2011): p. 52 19
The History of Racism and Radical Nationalism in European Football
Modern football, born into the world of nation-states, was prone to be used by various rulers and dictators in their interests. In the 20th century football was more and more likely to become an instrument in the international relations. The power of the game to unite and consolidate communities can also serve to incite radical nationalist feelings and seeming superiority. The symbolic meaning of victory on the football pitch is often projected and transformed into political victories and used to consolidate power of the ruling elites.
One could hardly find better examples to illustrate this than the use of 1934 Men’s World Cup in Italy by Benito Mussolini.16 The international tournament and especially the victory of the
Italian team was portrayed as the victory of fascism and helped to increase the profile if not contribute to legitimization of the regime. Similar situation occurred during the 1978 Men’s
World Cup in Argentina when the military dictatorship was trying to use the international event to consolidate power and gain credibility internationally.
Naturally, the Nazis also attempted to use football as well as other sports to illustrate the superiority of the ‘white race’. Although they utterly failed when black or Jewish athletes won at the Olympic Games, on the boxing rings and football fields, they still managed to bring a lot of destruction and oppression into the European football. After 1933 all the Jewish clubs or associated with resistance in Germany were closed and after the annexation of Austria in 1938 the players were integrated into the German national team except the Jewish.17 Even until the present days the World War II parallels are often invoked in the media whenever Germany plays against Netherlands, France or England, not to mention Russia.
Apart from being used by authoritarian governments on the international arena, football might also contribute to the consolidation of the oppressed communities and countries. Among
16 Kuhn, D. Soccer vs the State: p. 52. 17 Ibid: p. 54. 20
The History of Racism and Radical Nationalism in European Football
the well-known examples are the successes of the Ivory Coast team which helped at least temporarily to unite the country or post-Apartheid South African team. Gabriel Kuhn argues that the victory of the multicultural French team at their home 1998 Men’s World Cup helped to promote a more inclusive image of the nation and even contributed to diminishing the votes share of the right-wing Front Nationale at the upcoming elections.18
The new era in the European football which came after 1960s is extremely important for the history of racism and radical nationalism in the game. The dramatic changes which came with commercialization, escalation of violence, emergence of hooligan and ultra groups in football, intervention of the right wing political parties and movements into fan culture as well as increasing globalization and interconnectedness will be addressed in detail in the following subchapters.
2.1. Nature of the Game – Identities at the Extreme
Before touching the epochal changes in the European football after the 1960s, it is reasonable to reflect on a fundamental question one might ask when seeing the degree of violence and direct racist abuse deployed inside of the football grounds in many countries – is there something inherently divisive or even racist in the game itself? We have already discussed how the first black players were met in England and how the game developed through the crises of the 20th century.
Although many conflicts, violence and conflicts were somehow connected to football and the game was increasingly used to incite nationalist feelings, I would argue that the fault cannot be laid on football, as a sport.
As any other sport, football is competitive. The purpose of the game is to score more goals than the opponent team, demonstrate more skills, higher speed and more desire to win. As in any
18 Kuhn, D. Soccer vs the State: p. 62. 21
The History of Racism and Radical Nationalism in European Football
other sport, there are winners and losers, except for the cases when there is a draw. In the times of the Soviet Union and on the post-Soviet surface nowadays people say ‘friendship wins’ anytime there is a draw. But is it the only case when ‘friendship’ wins in football?Maybe if you think of modern day professional football played before the multimillion TV audiences by the players in all-star teams in international tournaments where big money are involved, then probably yes. But what is beautiful about the game itself - is that it can be played by anyone and everywhere.
The rules of the game remain almost the same for more than a century with minor changes as the game progressed. For playing it one needs decisively just the ball and several friends to kick the ball around and maybe something resembling a goal. From the very beginnings of the game in the English public schools, it was used to teach the kids certain values. As a team sport, football fosters communal feelings and teaches to behave in a collective. No individual skills or speed can ever win a match in football. Individual actions and ability to make decisions fast on the pitch are important and sometimes even decisive, but there are many examples when the underdogs won matches against the all-star teams because of the good team play.
I would argue that football as a sport conveys certain egalitarian values – everyone can play and achieve high results irrespective of their social or ethnic background, gender or sexuality – the rules are the same for everyone, and only performance on the pitch matters. For many years it has been as well as it is now the possibility to achieve success and popularity in society through football career. Multiple examples of the today renowned players from different countries have showed how much one can achieve in football with his or her skills, hard work and determination.
22
The History of Racism and Radical Nationalism in European Football
Playing football at different levels – from amateur fixture in the park to professional matches brings people together rather than divides. Things get more complicated when it comes to watching others playing. From the origins of professional football in England when people came to watch their street or factory teams play their neighbors, football was embedded in the local culture. It was a social event wherepeople from the same district, school or even church came together to socialize, entertain themselves and support their fellows on the pitch. With further development and rationalization of football, players and teams largely lost their connection to local communities but remained objects of admiration for the loyal fans.
The word ‘fan’ is a short form derived from ‘fanatic’ – a deep believer, passionate and dedicated whose passion can hardly be explained in rational terms. Indeed, today most of the fans who follow their clubs and consider them inseparable parts of their identity in most cases cannot explain why did they choose to support one club, rather than the other. Cornel Sandvoss quotes interviews with several Chelsea fans who explain why they support this particular club.19
Some of them cite among other reasons the multicultural squad of the team while others claim that Chelsea has always been a ‘white’ club. Depending on the social background and views people attribute certain characteristics to the clubs which themselves do not articulate any political positions, except for some clubs in Europe. One of the notable exceptions might be FC
Zenit of Saint-Petersburg which is widely believed not to sign black players because of the pressure from its majority of right-wing supporters. Even in this case the pressure comes largely from the supporters who believe club to be ‘white’ and not from the club itself. Clubs rarely articulate any political or other social positions not to alienate certain groups of supporters who might not share those positions.
19Sandvoss, C. A Game of Two Halves: Football, Television and Globalization. (London, 2003): p. 30. 23
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Sandvoss regards football fandom as the act of post-modern consumption, where people freely choose which club to support and project their own values and understanding of the community on the club, which is open for interpretation.20 In this fashion, certain clubs are being regarded as ‘white clubs’ or ‘working class clubs’ despite them objectively being such. Fans appropriate the football clubs, as spaces for projection of their subjective self-reflection.21
Through the common act of supporting the club at the stadium they sometimes build a shared collective identity.
The process of identity formation at the football stadium is similar to the described by
Benedict Anderson definition of a nation, as imagined community.22In the similar fashion supporters of a certain club or national team construct their understanding of a community. They imagine everyone to share the same values, history and qualities which they personally attribute to the club. Their imagined fan community is united across social differences, gender and age – they all support the same team. Nevertheless, despite being imagined as united, the stadium audience has always been in fact divided according to different characteristics, as well as real divides and inequalities exist in the nations.
Christian Bromberger noted that ‘the stadium can appear like a map of the town in microcosm or like a mirror that accentuates the lines of division marking our societies.’23The composition of the stadium indeed reflects the social differences with the VIP area at the top of the central stands, upper class occupants of the central tribune and the most passionate and young supporters behind the goals. It is important to understand that football does not create divides or incites hatred, but rather reflects tensions and hierarchies existing in the society.
20 Sandvoss, C. A Game of Two Halves: p. 44. 21Ibid: p. 44. 22Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. (London, 1991): p. 6. 23 Bromberger, C. Through the Looking Glass of Football in Demoisser, M.(ed) The European Puzzle: The Political Structuring of Cultural Identities at a Time of Transition, (New York, 2007): p. 132. 24
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Football stadium might serve, as an indicator of the inclusion of ethnic minorities into the community. The acceptance of ethnic minorities at the stands and extension of the community image to include everyone might serve as a characteristic of integration of the minorities into the society. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case in the European football till the present days.
Despite the fact that more than 25 per cent of the players in the English Premier League are black, the number of black supporters rarely exceeds 3 per cent.24In the absence of trustworthy statistics of this kind for other countries in Europe, this seems to hold true for most of them.
The imagined community of football supporters is often reluctant to accept the newcomers if they are in any way different from their understanding of local belonging. The projected vision of the local community is often ignorant to acknowledge the changes occurring in societies and tends to be conservative in most cases.
The potential for conflicts rises when we look at the relationships between supporters of opposing teams. It was always the advantage to play at the home ground where the majority of supporters support the team and on the contrary more difficult when the stadium cheers against you. The fans are trying to distract the players of the opposing teams with different mean including verbal insults. The atmosphere gets even more hostile when traditional rivals are playing, like the clubs from the same city or those which are believed to represent communities in conflict. When teams that are believed to be traditionally Catholic play against Protestant teams, or those associated with some traditions of the working class play against the clubs believed to represent the upper classes, the degree of emotional tension is very high.
Racist, Anti-Semitic or anti-Roma abuse is a traditional tool in the arsenal of the most hostile rivals. The clubs in Europe which were founded by the Jewish communities or considered to have connection to them like Tottenham in England, Austria in Vienna or Ajax in the
24 Kuhn, D. Soccer vs the State: p. 94. 25
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Netherlands are often met with anti-Semitic chanting or imitation of gas chamber noise by the supporters of the opposing teams more so if they are dominated by the right-wing groups.
Christos Kassimeris, for example, notes that the heated atmosphere of the football stadium where emotions dominate over rational thinking, and especially the anonymity of the crowd, serve as a fruitful ground for various kind of racist abuse.25 The people who would not openly make racist comments in the regular life, where such behavior might be socially inacceptable, allow themselves such comments or jokes at the football stadium. The atmosphere of hostility between the clubs playing or opposing supporters because of the believed differences might encourage and stimulate racist behavior, but in every particular case it depends on the social and political situation or political culture in the given country and not from the nature of the game itself.
There exist a number of scientific hypotheses about the nature of sport and football in particular. Some of them argue that sport is inherently conservative, others indicate some features that might foster integration and diversity, or to the contrary, sport helps to consolidate racialized stereotypes and be used as an instrument of cultural imperialism and colonialism.26What seems clear for me is that football can be fun and violent, inclusive and intolerant, an instrument of nationalist politics and liberation struggles, but without the attached meaning and social environment constructed around it – it is just a physical activity, only a game without the social fallacies in its inherent nature.
25Kassimeris, C. Anti-Racism in European Football: Fair Play for All, (Lanham, 2009): p. 9. 26 Jarvie, G. Sport, Racism and Ethnicity in Coackley, J. and Dunning, E. Handbook of Sports Studies(London, 2000): p. 336. 26
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2.2. European Football since 1960s: Commercialization, Globalization and Counter- movements
The European football developed steadily after the World War II with tactical innovations, increasing industrialization of the game and raising popularity. The changes that happened both in the game and around it since 1960s deserve special attention as most of them have instrumental meaning for the understanding of the present day football and the phenomena of racism and radical nationalism in the game.
The amount of money present in the game as well as its global popularity rose significantly with the development of the television broadcasting. Players gradually turned from local heroes to transnational TV stars earning skyrocketing salaries and participating in advertisement campaigns of multiple consumer brands. Although business and sponsorship was always present in the game in one way or another, since 1960s the clubs started to turn into private enterprises generating multimillion profit numbers for their owners through sponsorship contracts, merchandise of club-branded products, ticket sales and broadcasting rights.
The supranational regulatory bodies namely FIFA (International Federation of Football
Associations) and UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) expanded their influence manifold together with the popularity of international football competitions. The example of profit generating endeavors may be well illustrated by the England Men’s World Cup 1966, where the mascot was introduced, the official song was recorded and souvenirs with official branding were sold all over the country but still it might seem nothing compared to the estimated FIFA profit from 2010 Men’s World Cup in South Africa being more than 3 billion U.S. dollars.27
Apart from commercialization, the European football experienced another change in the composition of the teams. The teams that used to be almost exclusively white started to sign
27 Kuhn, D. Soccer vs the State: p. 73 27
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international star players from all over the world. The scouts were looking for skilled players in
Africa, Asia and especially Latin America. Major European clubs established their football schools on the African continent. The increasingly multicultural composition of the game was met with outright hostility and racist insults from the still predominantly white male crowds.
Particularly in England in the 1970s, when the first generation of players of African-Caribbean descent, whose parents came to the country in 1950s and 1960s, made their way to the major
English clubs, they experienced explosive numbers of racist abuse.28Viv Anderson became the first black footballer to play for the English national team in 1978. Till the 1990 the percentage of the black and ethnic minority players in the English clubs rose to 15 per cent.29 All over Europe the emerging players of ethnic minority background were subjected to racist chanting and banana throwing on the pitch by both supporters of the opponent team and the fans of their own club, who did not want to accept the ‘other’ in what they used to regard as the ‘white’ game.
Another significant change, occurred in the European football after 1960s, which directly influenced the scope and scale of racist abuse directed at ethnic minority players and supporters, was that in the composition of the stadium audience. The emergence of the new youth subcultures around football and their development reflected the changes in the respective societies. David Goldblatt noted that ‘The timing of the emergence of new fan cultures in
Europe almost precisely parallels the timing of each nation’s youth revolt’30 Indeed, the generational and political changes in the European countries found their reflection on the terraces. The youth between 15 and 25 started to gather separately from the rest of clubs’ supporters and occupied the stands behind the goals for the sake of symbolic separation from the traditional ‘passive’ older fans at the central stands, and also because the tickets behind the goals
28 Goldblatt, D. The Global History of Football.(London, 2006). 29Ibid. 30 Ibid.. 28
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were the cheapest. They invented a completely different style of fandom - a new subculture centered on the football club. The new youth football subcultures took two main forms which later travelled across Europe: hooligan firms in England in 1960s and Italian ultras of 1970s.
The British hooligan gangs or firms received considerable attention in both the media and the academia since the first violent clashes between the firms became known to the public. Scientists and the general public were trying to understand what makes young people gather in gangs and attack the supporters of opposing teams in the city, on the railway stations and in the underground. The hooligan firms were interested in violence by far more than in the game itself.
Although occasional fist fights were present around the game in England since its very beginning, football hooliganism, as an organized form of spectator violence, emerged in the 1960s and dominated the stands in many European countries for the decades to come.
Another form of the new active supporters emerged in Italy in the 1970s – the ultras. While hooligan firms are usually centered on pre- or after-match violence and often display only secondary interest in football itself, the ultras had football and the team at a center-stage. They produced dozens of hand-painted banners with club symbols, players’ portraits and slogans to support the club, used pyrotechnics to make their performances more spectacular and supported their team by continuous singing from the first minute of the match till the end. The ultra style of supporting the team was copied by many supporters around Europe, and by the 1990s, almost every club had a group performing similar rituals during every match. In some countries especially in Eastern Europe nowadays the separation between the ultras and hooligan groups is very blurred, and often same people who prepare visual performances during the match willfully engage in physical confrontation after it.
29
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The social and political crises of 1970s in many European states led to the resurgence of the extreme right-wing politics at different levels. In England, for example, at the background of high unemployment rates and budgetary cuts, the right-wing discourse of the National Front was gaining power. They utilized anti-migrant and anti-Semitic rhetoric to attract supporters who saw the problems of the country’s stagnating economy in the job competition from migrants. The young working class football supporters were too receptive to such kind of arguments and joined the National Front in large numbers. The xenophobic rhetoric of the party found its application in football where black professionals increasingly started to appear at many English clubs. The organizers of the National Front saw football terraces as their main recruitment field and gained success in many cases. Thus, precisely in England radical nationalist groups have first entered the supporters’ environment and were overwhelmingly successful.
Taking into account that England was and to some degree remains a trend-setter, when it comes to football, the style and attitudes of the British hooligan firms of the 1970s including overt racism and radical nationalism were copied and transferred to many fan cultures across
Europe and especially in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite different social circumstances and the power of the right-wing political parties and movements, the football subcultures in many countries remain dominated by racist and xenophobic views. It is necessary to note that left-wing and anti-racist ultras and hooligan groups are also present in the
European football but remain decisively outnumbered by right-wing supporters. The notions of football supporter and racism became almost inseparable in the public view which finds justification at the stadiums in many parts of Europe.
In Italy, despite the initial 1970s progressive character of the ultras who were dedicated to the passionate support of the team without political connotations, many ultra groups were infiltrated
30
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by the right wing political organizations by the mid 1980s. Even the clubs which were traditionally associated with left-wing political tradition, like Roma, now host majority of right wing ultras and hooligans. The police statistics indicates that out of 80 000 active supporters in the Italian highest division more than 25 per cent are members of the extreme right wing political organizations.31 The neo-fascist organizations, like Movimento Sociale Italiano or Forza Nuova, have largely repeated the success of British National Front in turning football terraces into recruitment grounds and propaganda outlets.
The references to fascism and Benito Mussolini in particular became common at many terraces of the Italian highest division teams. The club AS Lazio from Rome deserves a separate mentioning for the continuous presence of fascist flags and discriminatory symbols during the matches. The attachment to the extreme right is so strong that one of the players, Paolo Di
Canio, used to greet the supporters with a Nazi salute, explaining this by the fact that he respects
Mussolini and grew up in Rome among the supporters of Lazio who were almost exclusively fascist.32
The clashes between ultras and hooligans of the right-wing and left-wing clubs in Italy often leave many casualties as cold weapons, and occasionally, even guns are used. Among the clubs who have traditionally left-leaning supporters are Livorno, Bologna and Genoa. The radical nationalist supporters not only display political propaganda at the stadium and direct racist abuse against ethnic minority players, but also exercise politically motivated violence against the supporters with opposite political views.
31 Markovits & Rensmann. Gaming the World: p. 221. 32 Ibid: p. 223. 31
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The scale of racist abuse from the stands was clearly seen when black Italian striker Mario
Balotelli was invited to play for the national team. Supporters of many clubs started to display banners and chant ‘There are no black Italians’ whenever Balotelli was at the pitch.33
In Spain after the fall of the Franco regime the radical nationalist parties and movements hold relatively little influence in society. However, ultras and hooligans of the Spanish clubs are often involved in physical attacks on antiracists and display the flags with emblems from the Franco times. The football battles in the country are mainly centered on the opposition between the
Catalan Barcelona and Basque Athletic Bilbao and the clubs from Madrid like the royal club of
Real Madrid. Nevertheless, the extent of tolerance towards racism and inability to recognize the problem may be well illustrated by just one incident.
The head coach of the Spain national team in 2005 Luis Aragones during a training session in a speech toward his players referred to the French striker Thierry Henry as ‘a black shit’.34
Aragones declined the accusations of racism, and the Spanish FA took no action until pressured from the antiracist community which resulted in a ridiculous 3000 Euro fine for the coach.
In many European states where anti-Semitism seemed to be almost extinct from the public sphere or at least largely unwelcomed, it has found a new home – football stadiums. In Germany,
Netherlands, Austria or Poland the anti-Semitic banners, chants with references to the Nazi concentration camps and imitation of the sounds of gas became widely utilized by the right wing supporters. The verbal abuse and chanting directed at the clubs that were founded by the Jewish communities or are believed to have some connection to them, like Austria Vienna, Ajax
Amsterdam or MTK Hungaria from Budapest is common wherever they would be playing.
33Ibid: p. 224. 34 BBC Sport, ‘Aragones Fined for Henry Remarks’, March 1, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/internationals/4055395.stm 32
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The use of the words Jew in Central and Eastern Europe and Gypsy in Southern Europe in a derogatory sense became emblematic for the respective fan cultures. The accusations of being
Jewish became the worst type of insults to use against the opposing team even if it has no historical connection to the Jewish community. Moreover, it gets ridiculous when the Neo-Nazi hooligans of the clubs call each other Jews.
For example, a characteristic case is described in the ‘Hateful’ monitoring report composed by the Polish anti-racist organization Nigdy Wiecej (Never Again) which documented racist and discriminatory incidents in the Polish and Ukrainian football from 2009 till 2011.35In a local
Polish derby between Stal and Resovia from Rzeszow, fans of both teams displayed anti-Semitic banners aimed to insult the opposite side. Resovia supporters displayed a big banner with a caricature face in a yarmulke stylized as the concentration camp uniform and inscription ‘Death to hook noses’. The fans of the opposing team instead displayed a picture of a rat in a Resovia t-shirt with a Star of David instead of the emblem. What is particularly striking is that both teams’ stands are dominated by the neo-Nazi groups. After pressure from anti-racist organizations and international exposure the Polish police prosecuted several people recognized from video surveillance recordings of the match, and clubs received fines from the Polish FA.
This case might serve just as a singular illustration of the wider atmosphere of racism and anti-
Semitism which dominates Polish fan scene. The chanting like ‘We will do what Hitler did to
Jews’36 could be heard at Polish stadiums since 1980s.
Similarly to the English and Italian fan scene, polish radical nationalist organizations receive significant support from the hooligan groupsand managed to infiltrate many football clubs.
35 Pankowski, R. ‘Hateful’ Monitoring report (Warsaw, 2011) available at http://www.farenet.org/resources/Hateful_monitoring_report.pdf accessed August 1 2012. 36 Pankowski, R & Kornak, M. ‘Poland’, in Mudde, C. ‘Racist Extremism in Central and Eastern Europe’ (London, 2005): p. 170. 33
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Especially successful in this endeavor was the National Rebirth of Poland (Narodowe
Odrodzienie Polski - NOP), recruiting members from the hooligan gangs of major Polish football clubs. Its emblem of a hand with a sword may be seen at the stadiums as an indicator of affiliated groups present among the active supporters.
In line with the wider European trend, neo-Nazi hooligan groups emerged in West Germany in the 1980s. In light of the debates over issues of migration and growing internationalization of football, the conservative parts of West German football supporters provided aggressive xenophobic and overtly racist responses. The usual arsenal of monkey chanting and banana throwing as well as banners with neo-Nazi symbols appeared at different stadiums. Nevertheless, by the mid-1990s the intensive debates in society and overall political culture coupled with the protests of majority of fans against the neo-Nazis helped to contain the most violent groups and somehow localize the problem although not eliminating it in any case.37
What was to some degree contained in West Germany, received no resistance in the then already failing state of the GDR. Groups of young neo-Nazis occupied terraces in many cities in the East and formed gangs like ‘HoNaRa’ (Hooligans-Nazis-Racists) of Chemnitzer FC.38 The situation got even worse after reunification, when the Eastern part of Germany found itself in the midst of social and economic crisis. High unemployment rates, absence of perspectives and totalitarian aftertaste contributed to the spread of neo-Nazi ideas among the youth, especially in the small towns and villages. Until today, despite the general atmosphere of equality and sensitivity towards the issue in the top German division – Bundesliga, the lower division clubs especially from the East like SG Dynamo Dresden, FC Sachsen Leipzig, or Berlin-based Herta
BSC are largely dominated by violent neo-Nazi groups. It seems that the lower the league and the
37 Markovits & Rensmann. Gaming the World: p. 239. 38 Ibid: p. 241. 34
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smaller the town where matches are played, the less control and public attention it gets in the society, the bigger the scale of the problem remains.
The Eastern part of Germany after reunification became also fruitful ground for the extreme right wing party NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) to recruit new members and gain popular support. The best indication might be the decision to relocate their headquarters to
Dresden and consequent success at the local elections.39The ideology of the party strongly resonated with the right wing views of the hooligan groups which helped the party to take control over many youth groups around football.
The emergence of new youth subcultures of ultras and hooligans around football since 1960s, the intervention by the organizers of the reemerged radical nationalist parties and movements in
Europe marked the beginning of a new chapter in the history of racism in European football.
The challenges of globalization and increasingly multicultural societies gave birth to the violent counter-cosmopolitan backlashes in many football cultures. The successful intervention into skinhead and hooligan groups by the National Front in Britain has laid foundations and gave example to the other radical right-wing parties on the continent. Almost in every country where the new subcultures emerged, after England, they almost by default were following the established pattern, becoming the most fruitful base for radical nationalist recruiters and propaganda. In the following chapter I will address the relationship between football hooliganism and racism, focusing on the history and connections between the two phenomena in detail.
2.3. Hooliganism and Racism
The organized and spontaneous violence between the supporters of different clubs and riots with the police inside the stadiums became common at the football matches throughout 1970s
39 Ibid: p. 240. 35
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and decades after. It still remains significant problem in most of the European states. The phenomenon of football hooliganism has received considerable attention both from the media and academia since its very beginnings. The so called ‘English disease’ was seen as a major threat to the future of the game and well-being of the visitors inside the stadiums.
The new youth subculture characterized by the cult of violence, masculinity and hatred to many ‘others’ emerged and acquired its main characteristics in England in the 1960s. The social crisis, generational tensions and the rapidly developing television all contributed to the perception of football hooligans as a national threat. The scandalous reporting in the media about the hooligan clashes as something outrageous and unprecedented that requires harsh measures created an image of football supporter who was drunk, violent and uncontrollable.
The youth who gathered in the stands behind the goals at the football stadiums acquired their own dress code and patterns of behavior. The increasing competition between these groups created a complicated relationship of inter-group rivalries between the hooligan firms of different clubs across England. Each of them tried to develop their own style and methods of proving who is the toughest to their opponents. Ones specialized on attacks on trains with supporters of opposing team, others performed their assaults in the underground, and almost everyone tried to challenge their opponents directly inside the stadiums.
The image of a football hooligan widely portrayed in most shocking details in the media became a source of panic for the general public in England in the 1960s. The problem received
European-wide coverage in the run-up to the Men’s World Cup 1966 in England when crowds of football hooligans received coverage in the foreign media and were seen as the biggest damage for the international image of the country.40 To some degree the attention and scandalous character of reporting even the smallest incidents related to hooligan violence reinforced the
40 Spaaij, R. Understanding Football Hooliganism (Amsterdam, 2006): p. 78 36
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popularity of the subculture in the eyes of the youth and reaffirmed hooligan firms in their way of life. The press in many countries gave hooligans the attention they never deserved, addressing them as beasts, barbarians, thugs and yobs, which only consolidated and reaffirmed the sense of otherness the hooligans were searching for.
Constantly crossing the edge of the law and being the subjects of public anger for a long time coupled with prevailing cult of violence and uncompromised loyalty to the imagined community made hooligan firms receptive to the right-wing propaganda. The ideas propagated by the extreme right National Front found a lot of supporters among the hooligans. Being accustomed to use violence as a method, the hooligan firms have added ethnic minority people living in their communities to the list of enemies and physically assaulted them if met before the matches or at the stadiums.
Violence was seen by the hooligan firms as an end in itself, a way of releasing energy and aggression for the sole sake of fighting. In fact, the meanings attached to the use of violence such as the support of a rival club, city or district were secondary to the feeling of fun and joy received in the process of fight with the portrayed enemy. The police and football authorities were unable to contain the violence and always lagged behind the new tactics and methods used by the hooligans. The speed with which the fashion for football-related violence spread from England to other countries and the increasing scale of the incidents involving at times hundreds of people finally lead to the biggest tragedies ever known in the European football leaving dozens of people dead and many more injured.
The culmination of in-stadium violence and the turning point in history of the European football happened on May 29, 1985 during the European Cup final between Liverpool and
Juventus which was played in the Belgian stadium of Heysel in Brussels. The Liverpool
37
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supporters attempted an attack on the Italian fans right inside the stadium forcing the opponents to escape until they met a concrete wall which apparently collapsed leaving thirty-nine people killed and more than three hundred injured.41Despite the scale of the tragedy, UEFA and Belgian authorities decided to play the game while victims were simultaneously sent to morgues and hospitals. This disaster marked a point of no departure for the European football authorities and the police. Football, where regular supporters who decide to watch the games at the stadiums could feel threatened by violence which could outbreak at any moment was doomed.
Heysel tragedy was not the only and not the last one in the European football. Almost every country had similar or comparable tragedies with England standing separately with disasters like
Hillsborough 1989 or Bradford 1985.42 After these large-scale disasters connected to football hooliganism both football and state authorities started to deal with the problem with introduction of repressive measures and new legislation against active supporters.
The new legislative measures attempted to contain the hooligans and prevent them from inciting violence at football grounds in England and were largely transferred to other countries and football associations. The Public Disorder Act of 1986 introduced the possibility to ban supporters involved in football violence from football stadiums.43 Later innovations concerned travel bans, introduction of identification cards to access the stadiums, prohibition of specific football-related offences such as indecent chanting, throwing missiles and pyrotechnics, or entering the pitch without authority. In the last decades the international police cooperation especially inside the European Union allowed the creation of databases listing football hooligans to prevent them from travelling abroad.
41 Goldblatt, The Global History of Football. 42 Dunning, E. Towards a Sociological Understanding of Football Hooliganism as a World Phenomenon. European Journal of Criminal Policy and Research. (Volume 8, 2000): p. 147. 43 Kuhn, D. Soccer vs the State: p. 66. 38
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The UEFA also rapidly modernized their policing methods and developed mechanisms of segregation of the supporters of opposing teams inside the stadiums and increased the overall attention given to stadium security issues, cooperating with local authorities and the police in the preparation to the matches. As a supranational football authority, the UEFA distributed recommendations on fighting football hooliganism which had to be implemented by the national
FAs.
The new restrictive measures and increasing video surveillance received a lot of criticism from the human rights activists as giving the space for civil rights violations. Although football hooligans have always been the minority at the stadium, the new repressive measures affected the majority of supporters in an equal manner making the visit to a football match an increasingly difficult and unpleasant procedure. The stands were increasingly transformed into cages surrounded by police. Gabriel Kuhn argues that the legislation initially aimed to stop football violence was often used to prevent political activists from travelling to different gatherings.44The regular football supporters were also trying to protest against the violence of hooligans and created many grass-root initiatives in their clubs to make hooligan behavior inacceptable at their stands which were at times more effective than repressive measures directed at all fans.
The football hooligans responded and adapted to the new policing methods. As spontaneous violence became more difficult to incite inside the stadium which were transformed into fortified highly policed spaces, the hooligan firms became more organized and closed, shifting their focus on violence before or after the matches. The tightening of police control contributed to the separation of hooligan firms from the crowd of active supporters, but also strengthening of their collective identity and search of new methods to attack opposing clubs’ firms. England has seen the rise of the cult hooligan firms known for extreme violence and in many cases neo-Nazi
44 Kuhn, D. Soccer vs the State: p. 67 39
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political views such as Inter City Firm at West Ham United, Headhunters at Chelsea, Zulu
Warriors at Birmingham City, Gooners at Arsenal, Soul Crew at Cardiff City and the Service
Crew at Leeds United.45 Each of the firms developed their own style of violence and preferred places to attack their opponents. With the help of tabloid media coverage and the aura of elitist groups spreading with gossips in the fans environment they became legendary and objects for imitation by the followers in other European states. The struggle between the police and hooligan firms lead to the firms abandoning their club colors and adopting a casual style not to stand out from the crowd. Hooligans could only be distinguished from the crowd by a special code of using particular brands of clothes like Fred Perry, Ben Sherman, Sergio Tacchini, Pringle, Lacoste, Fila,
Ellese and others.46
The main indicator of the harm caused by football hooliganism to the game was dramatically falling attendance of the matches in many European countries affected by the problem throughout 1980s and 1990s.47 As professional football without the spectators neither brings profit to the club owners, nor can it ever be sustainable and popular. With hooligans dominating the stands the atmosphere of the stadium became increasingly dense and unwelcoming. Families with kids could no longer visit football matches due to the fear of becoming victims of violent attacks or their children seeing the incidents of violence.
Since the 1960s European football grounds became especially unwelcoming for the ethnic minority fans. The range of verbal and symbolic racist abuse directed at black and minority players now concerned the fans even more, as they were least protected from physical attacks by racist hooligans. The successful infiltration of the football hooligan environment by the radical nationalist political organizations made visiting the football matches a direct risk of physical
45 Spaaij, R. Understanding Football Hooliganism: p. 81. 46 Spaaij, R. Understanding Football Hooliganism: p. 82. 47 Goldblatt, D. The Global History of Football. 40
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injuries for the ethnic minority supporters. The firms who overtly propagated neo-Nazi ideas inside the stadiums in the same fashion were attacking the random people with different skin color on the streets.
The common view established since 1970s in the media, academia and among many anti-racist activists often couples hooliganism and racism together as inseparable phenomena. In fact, the correlation between them is far from being that straight. Despite many hooligan firms in England being influenced by the radical nationalist organizations, they were not the only, although probably the most radical, source of racism and discrimination inside the stadiums. The levels of xenophobia and racism present in the given society always found its reflection at the football stands, inside the clubs and governing institutions.
Many researchers of the problem of racism and discrimination in football such as Gabriel
Kuhn, Christos Kassimeris, Daniel Burdsey and others argued that racism in football cannot be reduced to hooliganism and attributed only to the tiny minority of supporters. They insist that hooliganism and racism have different origins and reasons, and, despite being often coupled together, have absolutely different nature. The hooligans are only looking for the outlet of violence which has little to do with football itself.48 Being banned from entering football stadiums they would find other occasions to release their aggression rather than refraining from violence.
Daniel Burdsey argues that despite racist hooligan groups who overtly abuse players and supporters are less common nowadays, ‘football remains a primarily white institution: games are watched by crowds of predominantly white supporters, controlled by white match officials, and teams are run by white (male) managers, coaches, owners and directors’.49 Thus, the increasing numbers of ethnic minority players in the teams and relatively successful fight against radical
48 Kuhn, D. Soccer vs the State: p. 67. 49 Burdsey, Race, Ethnicity and Football: p. 22. 41
The History of Racism and Radical Nationalism in European Football
nationalist hooligans in the recent years should not lead to the conclusion that racism in football is gone. Rather it is necessary to speak about multiple racisms occurring on the pitch, in the changing rooms, at the terraces and institutions.
I would agree with this view that racism cannot be reduced to marginal racist hooligan groups but with several reservations. Football culture in every specific country requires separate analysis, individual approach to identifying the sources of racist behavior. While in the countries of
Western Europe where fan cultures are well developed and can effectively resist the presence of neo-Nazi groups, and where the problem receives considerable attention in society and among the football authorities, in Eastern Europe situation is quite different. Organized racist groups, which are almost extinct or at least made unwelcomed and unacceptable in Western Europe, still dominate the football grounds in Eastern and Southern Europe. So while the academic discussion about racism in football in England shifts to a more post-racial and post-hooligan era debates on inclusion and exclusion, racist violence from the organized neo-Nazi hooligan groups remains a major threat in Eastern and Southern Europe.
It is necessary to understand that racist and radical nationalist hooligan groups express the opinions which exist in some sections of society, although in an extreme and radical way. We should not downplay the problem of racist hooliganism as the most violent acts against ethnic minority fans are exercised by the organized hooligan groups. It depends on the local circumstances, but some gangs see among their main aims not only fighting other gangs but also eliminating the enemies of the white race and migrants, being it ethnic minorities or anti-racist supporters.
The institutional discrimination and bigotry in the stadium depend on the overall political and football culture in the country and at every stadium in particular. Bigotry and bananas on the
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pitch are horrible, but it is nothing compared to physical assaults exercised outside the stadiums often with the use of different cold weapons for the sole reasons of being of different skin color or supporting egalitarian political views and loving football.
With the power and visibility hooligan groups possess inside the stadiums they set an example and make such behavior acceptable among the wider audience. The incidents of overt racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism displayed by the organized hooligan groups which are not adequately addressed by the football authorities might encourage other supporters to follow their example and act in a way they would not otherwise do. Especially harmful such behavior might be for the younger kids who are present at the stadiums, as they often grow up observing it and treating it as socially acceptable.
Therefore the relationship between racism and hooliganism has to be addressed on a country- specific basis. It is impossible to equalize hooliganism and racism because these two social problems have inherently different nature. Nevertheless, the problems are often coupled together and present the biggest threat both to the ethnic minority supporters and to the rest of the stadium audience. It would be improper to say that anti-racist struggle has a linear nature and follows certain path which is same for every country. Nevertheless, the combination of hooliganism and racism should be treated as the primary threat in the countries of Eastern and
Southern Europe. If the ideological dominance of radical nationalist groups at the stadiums is coupled with physical power of the aggressive hooligan crowds, the problem becomes more difficult to address, than if we would address both problems separately.
43
3 Case Study: Radical Nationalism in the
Ukrainian Fan Scene
In this chapter I am presenting a case study on racism and radical nationalism in Ukrainian football. In the light of the common European history of football culture, I am going to analyze the specificity of the situation in Ukraine, identifying main actors, historical developments in football and society as well as direct representations of racism and radical nationalism at the
Ukrainian stadiums. The main goal of this case study is to illustrate the arguments presented in the previous chapter and examine the particular reasons of the right-wing domination in modern
Ukrainian football.
Soviet football has a long and interesting story which deserves more attention, but here I will introduce only the main milestones directly related to the topic of the paper and focus on the post-Soviet football history of Ukraine. Most of the present-day successful football clubs were
44
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founded in the 1920s and 1930s under the Soviet Union, like the major Ukrainian FC Dynamo
Kyiv in 1927. Football and sport in general had to serve ideological purposes of the party and maintain physical health and provide entertainment for the Soviet citizens. The majority of the clubs were attached either to the army, police, railway or other industrial enterprises. The club from the Ukrainian capital Dynamo Kyiv which was doomed to become the main club of the republic was created under the protectorate of the police and the secret service – NKVD.
The story I, as many generations of kids before me, was told at school, narrates the legend about the Death Match played by Dynamo Kyiv during the Nazi occupation in 1942. It is a brilliant example of how football was used as an ideological instrument in the central state narrative of the Great Victory over fascism. The World War II was used as an example of power of the Soviet state and remained the core nation-building narrative till the very break-down of the
Soviet Union. The legend about the Death Match tells that during the Nazi occupation of Kyiv the occupants decided to play a football match against the main team of the Ukrainian republic,
Dynamo Kyiv. The aim of the former was to show their superiority and assumed victory in the war. According to the legend, Dynamo players were ordered to lose the game under the threat of being murdered, if they win. The whole team refused and won the game in a symbolic act of resistance to the Nazis for which they were shot straight after the game.
It is a beautiful story about football being an instrument of resistance against the occupying forces. The problem is that this story remains only a legend, as no historical evidence was found confirming that this match was ever played. Nevertheless, Ukrainian football team called Start indeed played against different Nazi teams during the occupation and several footballers of pre-
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war Dynamo Kyiv were executed in the concentration camps for allegedly being officers of the
NKVD.50
Although the Soviet football developed in a relative isolation from the Western European football for many years, and the clubs could rarely succeed in the international tournaments, it was still very popular along other sports where the country had sound international success such as ice hockey, volleyball or athletics. The swan song of the Ukrainian football came in the mid-
1970s and lasted till mid-1980s when Dynamo Kyiv dominated the Soviet championship and won six titles in a decade and championed the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1975 and 1986.51
This was made possible under the leadership of Valeriy Lobanovskiy, the legendary Ukrainian coach who created a system of training and practice which combined statistical measurement of players’ performance with clear tactical schemes. The star goal scorer of that team and now the head coach of Ukraine national team, Oleh Blokhin, was recognized as the European Footballer of the Year in 1975.
Following the centralized system of state governance, the Soviet football was also highly centralized and structured around the major clubs. In Russia it was Spartak Moscow, in Georgia -
Dynamo Tbilisi, and in Ukraine – Dynamo Kyiv. The system of governance in the Soviet football implied that the main club in the country got the best players from the whole republic, best infrastructure and conditions. The concentration of each Soviet republic on one major club resulted also in the attachment of certain symbolism to the team. The victories of Dynamo Kyiv in the Soviet championship and especially against Spartak Moscow or the victory of Karpaty Lviv
50John C. Turnbull, AlonRaab, and Thom Satterlee, eds., The Global Game: Writers on Soccer (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008): pp. 189–194. 51 Goldblatt, 2006. 46
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in the Soviet cup in 196952 were treated as a celebration of the repressed Ukrainian national identity and seen as an act of resistance through the lens of core-periphery relations with Russia.
The generational revolts which happened in Western European societies and football in the
1960s occurred in the Soviet Union only in the mid-1970s and 1980s when the state was in the period of stagnation and could not control and fully prevent the import of Western rock music and lifestyle. So called fanaty (football fans), Soviet equivalent of the English hooligans and Italian ultras emerged relatively independently from both phenomena in the 1970s. The influx of young passionate supporters, attracted by the success of Dynamo Kyiv at the international arena, lead to the development of new style of football fandom. Spectators no longer watched the matches in silence; they started to express their emotions with the help of self-made text banners and slogans, songs and chants. Instead of the pyrotechnics used by the ultras elsewhere, the Soviet fanaty rolled and lighted up newspapers to make their support more spectacular. They also started to travel following their team at the away matches and meeting their opponents from other clubs.
At the initial stage of development, the Soviet fans were strictly controlled by the police and had to mind their behavior and especially slogans not to be arrested and prosecuted for political charges.
In the 1980s, the Soviet state was gradually losing its controlling power over the youth. The spread of the rock music, although still underground, was a symbol of youth revolt. Together with music, the football fans became less controlled and rivalries between the clubs from different republics gradually turned into confrontations between the fans which symbolically reflected each country’s aspirations for independence. Till the end of 1980s the rivalry between
Dynamo Kyiv and Spartak Moscow became one of the most severe. The culmination of this confrontation which lasts until today, was the match between the two teams in Kyiv in 1987.
52Kuhn, D. Soccer vs the State: p. 62. 47
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Several hundred travelling Spartak supporters were met with stones and fights broke up all over the city and around the stadium.53There was something more and other than football among the reasons of this street fighting. Wherever Spartak Moscow played – Riga, Tbilisi or Kyiv in the end of 1980s, they were always confronted with nationalist slogans and passions of people whose national identities were submerged for a long time but were finally released.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 lead to the creation of multiple national leagues which had to face the new economic reality and inherited infrastructure that was breaking apart.
The football clubs were privatized and now had to survive earning money from transfer of their best players abroad or from generous contributions of the new economic elite. The harsh economic reality of the country was reflected in its football which often saw empty stadiums, disintegration of many professional teams and financial troubles in those which stayed.
Privatization of the state property and natural resources by the former party bureaucracy with subsequent redistribution by the criminal clans at the stage of initial capital accumulation gave rise to the new economic elite – oligarchs. Those who managed to get their share and stay alive till the end of 1990s enjoyed the stabilization of economic situation and relative political stability to ensure the safety of their newly acquired large capitals. The owners of business empires in the media, metallurgy, financial or telecommunications sphere came in as the saviors and, consequently, masters of the Ukrainian football.
The first club which received financial input from the new elite was Dynamo Kyiv bought by
Grygoriy Surkis in the 1990s. The success of the club at the international arena towards the end of the decade and the rising prestige of ownership of a football club attracted other oligarchs to invest in clubs throughout the country. Clubs like Shakhtar Donetsk, DniproDnipropetrivsk,
MetalistKharkiv can now compete with Dynamo Kyiv and Shakhtar even taking over in the
53 Goldblatt, The Global History of Football. 48
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national league. With low ticket prices, underdeveloped system of merchandize of club-branded products and only recently developed media rights market, the Ukrainian football clubs remain unprofitable and require multimillion investments from their owners. Some clubs may serve as money laundering outlets with tax preferences for sport enterprises in Ukraine, others manage to hold on nurturing their players to later sell to the richer clubs. The oligarchs invested hundreds of millions into their clubs like Rinat Akhmetov, owner of Shakhtar Donetsk and the richest man in
Ukraine, Igor Kolomoiskyi, owner of Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk and several other clubs in the national league, Oleksnadr Yaroslavskiy, construction tycoon and owner of Metalist Kharkiv.
They have built new high class stadiums and infrastructure and maintain transfer budgets for their clubs at times bigger than majority of the Western European clubs.
Some people might argue that they made their investments in the future profits from the clubs in the increasingly commercial game of football, but I would argue that this phenomenon is to a greater extent a matter of prestige. Owning a football team is a symbol of wealth and status, belonging to the elite club of the richest people in the country. Ukrainian football resembles a chessboard where the oligarchs can experience competition from their friends who own other clubs. The club owners constantly stress that their team is playing for the thousands of spectators who are the main reasons of clubs’ existence, but such statements seem to be far from truth.
Most Ukrainian clubs are hardly maintaining the official fan-clubs with regular supporters but ignore the crowds of ultras and football hooligans present at every match and increasingly violent, racist and radical nationalist. Most clubs are treating them as unavoidable evil and largely ignore, not trying to promote the development of a different fan culture. The lack of sufficient attention from the clubs towards their fans makes possible negative developments at the
Ukrainian terraces. The clubs do not suffer financially from the decrease in attendance as their
49
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main sources of profit lie in completely different sphere – investments from the owners.
Therefore, the clubs feel no need in creating or supporting a fan culture.
Another important change in the post-Soviet football happened in the composition of the teams. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union the transfers of players between the clubs were administratively managed and could go only from the smaller clubs to the main clubs in the country like Dynamo Kyiv or Spartak Moscow. During the last decade Ukrainian football has seen an influx of foreign-born players in the national league. The club owners invited players from Latin America, Africa and Western Europe to increase the competitiveness of their teams both domestically and internationally. Naturally, first black footballers appeared in the Ukrainian national league only recently. Nevertheless, the fashion for foreign stars and regular footballers increased very rapidly and now major Ukrainian clubs field at least half of the squad with
Argentineans, Brazilians, and players from Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal or other countries with established football cultures. The main difference to the situation in England, where black players gradually entered football teams as a consequence of the percentage of population of Afro-
Caribbean origin, was that in Ukraine foreign-born players were invited to play for several seasons, attracted by generous salaries, and rarely stayed in the country for longer periods. While the general population remained relatively mono-ethnic, Ukrainian football became one of the most multicultural spheres in society.
3.1. Interethnic Relations and Tolerance in Ukraine.
At the turn of the 21st century, Ukraine remains to be predominantly mono-ethnic state with minorities making up around 20 per cent of the population, biggest part being Russians.54 As the
54 Likhachev, V. Xenophobia in Ukraine: General Situation and Hate Crimes, in Andriyko, V et. al. Right-wing extremism and Tolerance: Ukrainian and German Experience. (Kyiv, 2008): p. 20. 50
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Soviet Union was a state with closed borders, it strictly regulated and largely prevented inward migration. The exceptions constituted small number of students from the ideologically friendly states in Africa, Asia and Cuba who studied at the Soviet military, technical and medical universities as a form of aid to the allied states. In single cases, mostly in the 1980s when the
Soviet Union was already disintegrating, former students stayed in the country to build their lives in the newly independent states. Meanwhile, the Soviet citizens enjoyed a relatively free movement between different republics often being sent to another republic according to the state job appointments after the university. The Soviet Union for many decades was trying to construct a notion of the soviet people erasing or ignoring multiple national identities which ought to be included in this term.
The heritage of the Soviet migration policies led to a certain categorization of ethnic minority groups who currently live in Ukraine. Some scholars regard Bulgarians, Georgians, Armenians,
Jewish, Tatars, Roma, Belarusians and other nationalities formerly included in the Soviet Union as traditional minorities, while the communities whose number increased only after independence due to the arrival of students, refugees or businessmen from Asian, African or Middle Eastern states are regarded as non-traditional or non-typical.55In the last decades Ukraine also became increasingly used by irregular migrants and traffickers to reach the Schengen border. With widespread corruption and proximity to the EU, Ukraine has become a popular transit route for regular and irregular migrants. Although some of them decide or forced to stayin Ukraine failing to reach their destination countries, the actual numbers are largely exaggerated by the right-wing politicians and manipulated increasing the levels of xenophobia in society. The speculations on the topic of migration are similar to those used by right-wing populists in other countries of
55 Ghosh, M. Diversity and Tolerance in Ukraine in the context of EURO 2012. (Kyiv, 2011): p. 10. 51
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Europe and include arguments that migrants allegedly bring exotic diseases, create competition on the job market and etc.
Traditional minorities are usually regarded as relatively well integrated in the Ukrainian society due to the long history of coexistence at this territory, while the non-typical minorities remain largely isolated and alienated in the society. The interviews conducted by the Eastern European
Development Center with foreign students in many cities indicate that students do not get enough assistance from the host universities, do not have access to language courses and face institutional discrimination at the universities and society, especially suffering from racial profiling by the police on the streets.56
The Ukrainian society is generally regarded as tolerant and avoided any serious inter-ethnic conflicts after gaining independence. The major political and ethno-linguistic divide lies between the Western and South-Eastern parts of the country. Eastern and Southern regions are traditionally populated by the Russian minority and Russian-speaking Ukrainians who generally support the foreign policy of closer cooperation with Russia while the Western regions support a pro-European foreign policy, but at the same time being more nationalist and even radical nationalist. This divide plays a major role in domestic politics and largely speculated on by all political forces in the country.
The Ukrainian state enjoyed the inter-ethnic peace for many years without significant regulative efforts from the government. This has lead to the absence of state integration policy towards ethnic minorities and the lack of necessary legal base on minorities’ protection and promotion of diversity.57The imperfections of the legal system leave space for political speculation on migration and ethnic minorities’ issues. The state migration policy only indicates
56 Ghosh, M. Diversity and Tolerance in Ukraine in the context of EURO 2012: p. 10. 57Likhachev, V. Xenophobia in Ukraine: p. 22. 52
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prevention of irregular migration as its main principle ignoring the integration migrants and protection of minorities.
Ukraine also lacks systematic research on the levels of xenophobia in society. Some sociological centers only measure the social distance according to Bogardus scale as there is no state-supported research on this topic.58 According to the results of this measurement, Ukrainians express positive attitude towards ethnic Russians, Belarusians and traditional minorities such as
Jewish, Polish, Bulgarians and Crimean Tatars. A more significant social distance exists towards
Turkish, Azerbaijanians, Armenians and Uzbek people. The most negative attitudes bordering isolation and alienation are expressed towards people of African or Asian origin and Roma. The
Bogardus scale cannot represent an adequate measurement of the levels of xenophobia but indicates the predominant attitudes towards ethnic minority communities living in Ukraine.
The human rights organizations and anti-racists also point at the difficult situation with hate crimes in Ukraine. The state authorities do not record statistics on hate crimes and do not perform any monitoring of the situation. The only available and most complete data on hate crimes committed in Ukraine in the last years is provided in the monitoring of an NGO Congress of National Communities of Ukraine.59 The data presented in the monitoring is far from complete, but is the most trustworthy according to the methodology and sources. According to the results of the monitoring, more than three hundred hate crimes committed in the period from 2006 till
2012 were recorded including thirteen people dead resulting from the attacks. The people suffering from such crimes usually include the representatives of visible minorities – with skin color other than white and non-Slavic appearance or wearing characteristic religious clothes. In most cases the perpetrators are small groups of neo-Nazi skinheads and football hooligans who
58 Likhachev, V. Xenophobia in Ukraine: p. 24 59 Likhachev, V. Statistic on Hate Crime in Ukraine, 2006-2012, available at http://eajc.org/page609. 53
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attack visible minorities either spontaneously in the streets or perform pre-planned attacks next to the religious places such as synagogue.
The recording of comprehensive statistics on hate crime is problematic due to other factors as well. Despite the existence of article 161 (incitement of racial or interethnic hatred) in the
Criminal Code of Ukraine, it is rarely used against the perpetrators. The police and prosecutors usually qualify crimes against visible minorities and foreigners as hooligan actions, as they prefer to ignore the motives or consider the racial motive very difficult to prove in the court.60 This leads to inadequate representation of data on hate crimes available at the Ministry of the Interior.
Another problem is that many racially motivated attacks on foreign students and visible minorities remain unreported, as victims themselves hesitate to report such crimes to the police.
Given the levels of corruption and insufficient language proficiency coupled with reluctance of the police to investigate racially motivated crimes, the victims prefer not to report the incidents to police unless they caused serious injuries. The level of trust towards the police is generally low in the Ukrainian society due to the widespread corruption and inefficiency. The communication with the local police is even more problematic for ethnic minorities. The xenophobic sentiments and racial profiling is widespread among the Ukrainian police officers.
Mridula Ghosh, chairman of human rights NGO East European Development Center quotes the interviews conducted with foreign students living in Ukraine on issues of communication with local police and authorities. 40 per cent of the interviewed confirmed that they or their friends were victims of racist attacks but decided not to report the incidents to the police because ‘it was no use’.61
60 Ghosh, M. Diversity and Tolerance in Ukraine in the context of EURO 2012: p. 11. 61 Ibid: p. 8. 54
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3.2. Radical Nationalism in the State and Society
In order to understand the wider context and specificity of the situation, it is also necessary to briefly analyze the development of radical nationalism and main actors involved in intolerant activities in Ukraine. I will introduce the foundations of Ukrainian political nationalism, the development of radical nationalist political parties and movements after independence in 1991 and emergence of the new right-wing populist politics in Ukraine. Special attention will be given to the marginal non-registered organizations and movements which have significant influence among the football fans.
After the failed attempts to gain independence at the beginning of the 20th century under the
Soviet Union, many nationalist organizations and groups emerged in the Western part of
Ukraine. In 1919 the Western regions of what is currently Ukraine were part of Poland, while the
Central and Eastern parts constituted Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.62The Soviet government managed to control and suppress nationalist organizations in the Eastern parts with fabricated criminal cases against them and repressions. The Western part enjoyed relatively more political freedom under the Polish rule and semi-legal nationalist organizations mushroomed in the interwar period. The most influential of them, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
(OUN), was created in 1929. The ideological base of the organization was the doctrine of integral nationalism developed by Dmytro Dontsov which postulated the superiority and belonging of the
Ukrainian nation to the European tradition that will inevitably clash with the Russian civilization.63 The doctrine of Dontsov remains the main point of reference for modern radical nationalists.
62 Shekhovtsov, A. New Radical Right-Wing Parties in European Democracies: Determinants of Electoral Support. [Новые праворадикальные партии в европейских демократиях: причины электоральной поддержки.] (Stuttgart, 2011): p. 206. 63 Ibid: p. 207. 55
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During the World War II the activity of OUN was controversial and constitutes one of the most debated topics in the modern Ukrainian historiography and politics. At the initial stage of the war, after the intra-organizational split, the OUN, led by Stepan Bandera proclaimed independence of Ukraine and declared the support of the Nazis hoping for a place for independent Ukraine in Hitler’s new order in Europe. This vision contradicted the plans of the
Nazi Germany and soon after the occupation of Ukraine Bandera was arrested. The newly created in the 1942 military nationalist organization Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) overtook the OUN and continued the armed partisan struggle against both Nazi and Soviet troops. Some evidence suggests that UPA detachments took part in ethnic cleansing in Western Ukraine and murders of Jewish, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian population who refused to cooperate with
UPA.64Most of the radical nationalist organizations in Ukraine until the present days draw precisely on the interwar heritage of nationalist organizations and claim to continue the traditions of the OUN and UPA.
In the following decade after the end of the World War II the all nationalist resistance in the
Western Ukraine was suppressed and reemerged again in comparable forms only towards the end of 1980s. The newly created nationalist movements demanded the state independence for
Ukraine and enjoyed considerable support among the population. Nevertheless, after the Soviet
Union disintegrated peacefully, the Ukrainian political nationalism faced certain crisis. The main aim and purpose of their existence – state independence was achieved and they did not manage to formulate new political goals and appealed largely to the revival ethno-cultural traditions which doomed to be considered secondary by the electorate who lived through the period of deep economic crisis and restructuring. The inability to formulate sound economic policy led to the
64 Rudling, P. A. Theory and Practice: Historical Representation of the Wartime Activities of the OUN-UPA (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Ukrainian Insurgent Army). in East European Jewish Affairs. 2006. Vol. 36. No. 2. p 165. 56
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continuous electoral failures of the nationalist parties. The anti-Russian rhetoric of these parties could find support only in the Western parts of the country as its Eastern parts traditionally had more connections to Russia and rejected Ukrainian ethnic nationalist ideas. Most of the nationalist parties and movements in the 1990s subscribed to the national democratic model and could be characterized as liberal nationalist.
The most radical of the existing nationalist parties throughout the 1990s was the Social-
Nationalist Party of Ukraine. It postulated the goal of national and social revolutions in Ukraine employing xenophobic and ethno-nationalist rhetoric. The party never enjoyed significant electoral support and remained marginal in the Ukrainian political spectrum. The radical nationalist slogans of the party nevertheless attracted significant numbers of young supporters among the newly emerging at the end of 1990s subcultures of neo-Nazi skinheads and football hooligans 65It provided political expression for the marginal youth groups and speculated on the anti-Russian and anti-Semitic sentiments.
At the turn of the 21st century the party established connections with the French Front
National of Jean-Marie Le Pen and other European new right-wing parties.66Under the influence of the European colleagues, the party added anti-migrant and anti-globalization rhetoric to their political propaganda. In 2004 the Social-Nationalist Party was renamed into VO Svoboda analogous to the Austrian Freedom Party and tried to increase their public profile slightly modifying its political program to exclude the most provocative and radical positions. Despite the change of orientation towards more respectable image the party remained the most radical nationalist political formation which was officially registered in Ukraine and participated in the electoral process. As noted previously, the renamed party tried to copy often mechanically the
65 Shekhovtsov, A. New Radical Right-Wing Parties in European Democracies: p. 214. 66 Ibid: p. 214. 57
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rhetoric of the right-wing populist parties in Western Europe even concerning largely irrelevant issues in Ukraine as migration. The rebranding of the party did not help to increase electoral support of the party as its ideology was accepted only by some parts of the population in the
Western part Ukraine and largely alien for the generally pro-Russian East of the country.
The inability of any radical nationalist party to get a fraction in the Ukrainian parliament since independence was described by many researchers as an anomaly.67 Given the regional political divisions existing between the East and West in Ukraine, no radical nationalist party could claim success in the parliamentary or presidential elections. After the orange revolution in 2005 when
Viktor Yushchenko became president of Ukraine, the situation became even more complicated for VO Svoboda. The newly elected president articulated most of the ideas of the liberal nationalists including historical, linguistic and cultural issues as well as rhetoric of integration to the EU as opposed to closer relations with Russia. What was previously seen as oppositional national-democratic rhetoric was now implemented as a state policy leaving only radical anti- migrant and anti-Semitic rhetoric for VO Svoboda which could not provide significant electoral support.
Nevertheless, in a few years, after the political break-ups between the national democratic parties in power and the alliances with pro-Russian political forces, traditional national- democratic opposition gradually lost popular support. The crisis in the opposition allowed VO
Svoboda to present themselves as the only representatives of the interests of ethnic Ukrainians and protectors of Ukrainian culture and language from pro-Russian political forces. Given the general dissatisfaction and mistrust to major parties by the electorate, VO Svoboda managed to get significant support at the elections to regional councils winning the majority of places at
67 Umland, A. Die Andere Anomalie der Ukraine: ein Parlament ohne rechtsradikale Fraktionen. in Ukraine- Analysen No 41, 2008: p. 7. 58
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Ternopil regional council in 2009 and entering Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and some other regional councils in the West of Ukraine in 2010.68
As a result, VO Svoboda became accepted in the highest levels of Ukrainian politics and received significant attention from the media which contributed to the rise of popularity of the party. Currently, the levels of electoral support of the party are close to the necessary minimum to be elected to the national parliament at the upcoming 2012 elections. The party almost refrained from the anti-Semitic and anti-migrant rhetoric in the public discourse concentrating on the anti-Russian and ethno-cultural issues. Despite the more publicly acceptable image of the leaders of the party, its members often participate in the street manifestations and actions with xenophobic or racist slogans. The party managed to gain support of the major youth radical nationalist organizations and movements gaining free mobilizing resource for their street demonstrations.
Along the officially registered radical nationalist organizations there also exist several informal organizations and movements propagating racist and neo-Nazi ideas in society. The first groups of neo-Nazi skinheads started to appear in Ukraine at the end of 1990s imitating the style and ideas they found in music and literature on skinhead subculture which came from Western
Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They adopted the visual attributes of skinhead subculture and racist ideas based on a primitive ideological base. The small gangs emerged mostly in large cities and committed spontaneous and organized attacks on visible minorities on the streets targeting people with different skin color or appearance, in most cases foreign students, tourists and diplomats. They believed they are fighting for the white race against the invaders. The neo-Nazi music scene developed with underground concerts and close communication with the
Russian colleagues where same developments took place.
68 Shekhovtsov, A. New Radical Right-Wing Parties in European Democracies: p. 221. 59
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The street gangs of neo-Nazi skinheads were the most dangerous for ethnic minorities on the streets at that time but marginal in society and without any influence in political sphere.The lifestyle was mechanistically copied from the neo-Nazis in Western Europe and consisted mainly of visual attributes, music and racially motivated violence often coupled with alcohol abuse. The first attempt to build a political organization out of neo-Nazi skinheads was undertaken in 2005 with creation of Ukrainian National-Workers Party which was never officially registered. The political program of the ‘party’ almost entirely copied the program of the NSDAP. It was doomed to remain marginal comprising several dozens of neo-Nazi skinheads and football hooligans in few Ukrainian cities.
After several years of existence it was reorganized into the so called autonomous resistance following the trends of radical right-wing movements of autonomous nationalists in Western Europe.
The autonomous groups started mushrooming in different cities of Ukraine rallying in the streets against migrants, ‘for the healthy way of life’ and attacking visible minorities. They portrayed themselves as autonomous but their activity coincided largely with anti-migrant campaigns and
“health rallies” of the VO Svoboda party. They became closely linked with the party and turned into its unofficial youth branch.
The second most active radical nationalist organization is Patriot of Ukraine, which is officially registered as an NGO. The organization is strictly hierarchical and militarist. They describe their ideology as social-nationalism and are founding members of the Social-Nationalist
Assembly.69Members of the organization wear uniforms at the street rallies and often perform military and ideological trainings in the field camps. Patriot of Ukraine is mostly active and has branches in the Eastern part of Ukraine. Its main base is in Kharkiv with branches in Odesa,
69 Kobzin & Chernousov, Intolerant activities and organizations in Ukraine. Results of a Sociological Research. [Нетолерантна діяльність та організації в Україні], (Kharkiv, 2008). 60
Case Study: Radical Nationalism in the Ukrainian Fan Scene
Chernivtsi, Chernihiv and Kyiv regions. The activity of the organization is concentrated on street rallies, attacks on visible minorities and music concerts. Most of the activities take place in
Kharkiv or Kyiv region.
It should be also noted that apart from Ukrainian radical nationalist organizations there exist also a number of pro-Russian radical nationalist organizations in the Eastern and Southern parts of Ukraine. The organizations such as Slavic Union, United Fatherland (Edinoe Otechestvo), political party Rodina propagate Russian chauvinist ideas and speculate on anti-Ukrainian sentiments of the population in the East and South of the country. Apart from the appeals to ethnic Russians to protect their land against ‘fascist Ukrainians’ they also employ anti-Semitic and anti-migrant rhetoric.
The activity of the informal radical nationalist organizations is confined to the street demonstrations gathering several hundred supporters at best and they remain politically marginal.
Nevertheless, they attract significant number of young people who follow the subcultural lifestyle and adopt the mainstream ideological narratives uncritically. These organizations also exercise significant influence on football fans and recruit majority of their members from football hooligans and neo-Nazi skinheads. Although in the last several years the popularity of the neo-
Nazi skinhead subculture declined and members of informal radical nationalist organizations relatively refrained from physically attacking visible minorities on the streets, they use physical violence against political opponents and anti-racist activists. These organizations are fighting for influence among the youth against different left-wing organizations often employing violence to confront their imagined enemies. They often use recruited football hooligans accustomed to violence to threaten and attack anti-racist activists.
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Case Study: Radical Nationalism in the Ukrainian Fan Scene
3.3. Racist Incidents and Display of Discriminatory Symbols in Ukrainian Football
The fan scene of active supporters started to develop in Ukraine already at the end of the
Soviet era – in the 1980s. Young people started to support their teams more actively with continuous chants, slogans and banners. The collapse of the Soviet Union has thrown the country in turmoil of economic crisis and restructuring. For the most part of 1990s the society and young people in particular were trying to sustain themselves economically with different means so they had little time for leisure and going to football games. Football was also undergoing similar restructuring and adjustment to the new economic and social reality.
At the end of the 1990s when the general situation in the country started to stabilize, Ukraine has seen a boom in youth subcultures. The society was very sensitive and receptive of the new cultural trends flowing from the Western Europe. Different music styles developed and the fashion for subcultural lifestyle started to spread from the capital to smaller cities. The attendance of the football matches also grew especially given the success of Dynamo Kyiv at the international arena at that time.
The emerging groups of neo-Nazi skinheads started to visit football matches and gather active supporters around them. The active supporters adopted and imitated the ready-made patterns of behavior from the stories about the English hooligans. The rejection of the communist past and strong state nation-building narrative made young people receptive of right wing political ideas.
Belonging to a hooligan group was fashionable and gave the teenagers the illusion of power and respect in the streets.
The active supporters adopted and developed visual attributes of subculture by the way of imitation. The Celtic cross, symbol used by the neo-Nazis throughout Europe after swastika was banned by law in many countries, became widely used among the active supporters. One of the
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Case Study: Radical Nationalism in the Ukrainian Fan Scene
first fan magazines published by Dynamo Kyiv supporters in 1998 featured a Celtic cross on its front page and declared the national unification of Ukrainian supporters. (see Appendix 1.) The fashion for football hooliganism has spread from the capital to other cities and small groups started to appear at the stadiums in Kharkiv, Lviv, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk and other cities. A system of inter-club rivalries and alliances developed with the strongest connection emerging between the three clubs – Dynamo Kyiv, DniproDnipropetrovsk and KarpatyLviv. Despite regional differences, the emerging subculture adopted neo-Nazi symbols as something pre- determined and only later was trying to find some justification for the use of such symbols. In the absence of significant number of visible ethnic minorities on the streets of the Ukrainian cities, the football hooligans constructed the Jewish as their enemies building on anti-Semitic sentiments present in many Eastern European societies.
The first racist incident of a large scale happened in 2002 when a group of neo-Nazi skinheads and football hooligans attacked a synagogue in Kiev shortly after the football match they attended.70The crowd was throwing stones and bottles breaking the windows in the building and attacked people inside the synagogue. The organizer of the attack – leader of the Ukrainian neo-
Nazi skinheads and leader of the SokyraPeruna music band DmitryiVolkov was later arrested and one year later sentenced to four years of prison for inciting racial hatred.71 Despite the obvious connection of the attack with the football hooligan gangs, neither police nor football authorities recognized the emergence of the right wing extremist tendencies in the Ukrainian football.
Meeting no obstacles from football authorities, the right wing hooligan movement grew and attracted new supporters across the country. The neo-Nazi symbols and radical nationalist views
70 Worldwide Religious News, ‘Youths Attack Synagogue in Kyiv’ April, 14 2002 retrieved August, 28 2012 from http://wwrn.org/articles/7033/?&place=belarus-ukraine§ion=judaism. 71 Korrespondent, ‘The criminal who broke windows at the Kyiv synagogue was sentenced to four years of prison’ [Преступник, разбившийокнавКиевскойсинагоге, осужденна 4 года], March, 13 2003 retrieved August, 28 2012 from http://korrespondent.net/ukraine/events/66895-prestupnik-razbivshij-okna-v-kievskoj-sinagoge-osuzhden- na-4-goda. 63
Case Study: Radical Nationalism in the Ukrainian Fan Scene
were adopted almost by default with the new groups and widely displayed at the stadiums. The xenophobic ideas and right wing domination in the fan culture was unchallenged as regular supporters ignored the youth that was gathering behind the goals and authorities did not react on the content of the banners or chants.
At the initial stages of development of the active supporters in Ukraine there was no separation between the ultras and hooligans. The same people who were drawing banners and designing choreographies involved into street violence before or after the football matches. A system of hierarchies according to the power of hooligan gangs developed and largely defined the ideological views of the majority of active supporters. Later the ultras and hooligan groups became more differentiated with certain parts of the active supporters concentrating on the visual and audio support of the team. The quantity of people behind the goals increased at every stadium in Ukraine as well as the quality and complexity of their performances. What remained unchallenged was the right-wing consensus in the Ukrainian fan scene. What first came as a fashion and trend copied from the neighboring countries, the tradition of right wing radicalism in
Ukrainian football developed and was maintained by the physical force of football hooligans and faced no opposition from other parts of the audience at the stadiums.
The presence of neo-Nazis at the Ukrainian stadiums became evident when in August 2007 a swastika flag was displayed during the match between Dynamo Kyiv and KarpatyLviv. (see
Appendix 2.) The flag was displayed by the neo-Nazi hooligans of both clubs among which were activists of the Ukrainian National-Workers Party to demonstrate friendship and the unity of ideas between the fans. The administration of FC KarpatyLviv denied the connection between the flag and their supporters calling the incident a provocation and demanding the police to find the perpetrators. The Ukrainian Football Federation (FFU) did not even fine any of the clubs for
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Case Study: Radical Nationalism in the Ukrainian Fan Scene
the behavior of their supporters also forwarding the issue to the police. As a result, no one was ever punished for the display of a swastika flag in Kyiv despite the wide media coverage incident received in the country.
The first systematic attempt to collect data about the presence of racist and radical nationalist groups at the Ukrainian stadiums was undertaken by the Football Against Racism in Europe
(FARE) network and Polish Never Again association who performed monitoring of the display of racist symbols in Ukrainian and Polish football from 2009 till 2011.With the help of the local initiative Football Against Prejudices they collected photographic evidence of the display of racist symbols at the Ukrainian stadiums and published a final report documenting the main trends and symbols displayed.72The evidence suggests that vast majority of the football clubs had their active supporters dominated by the neo-Nazis and radical nationalist groups. The symbols most commonly displayed during the matches included Celtic cross, neo-Nazi codes such as 14/88
(corresponding to the 14 words of a neo-Nazi skinhead icon David Lane and 88 meaning Heil
Hitler as H is the 8th letter in the Latin alphabet). Also common was display of different Nazi symbols from the World War II times such as SS Tottenkopf emblem or Wolfsangel.73 Different stylized swastika images were also displayed by the fans all over the country. The symbols were displayed by all clubs of the Ukrainian Premier League except one – Arsenal Kyiv whose supporters try to oppose the ideological domination of the neo-Nazis and created anti-racist ultras group.
Although neo-Nazi signs and banners are displayed by active supporters of many clubs, some of them may be distinguished where racism and radical nationalism goes beyond the established fashion and coupled with the activity of the political organizations. Among these clubs are
72 Pankowski, ‘Hateful’ - Monitoring racism, discrimination and hate crime in Polish and Ukrainian football 2009- 2011, Publication of FARE Eastern European Development Project, supported by UEFA., (Warsaw, 2011) 73 Ibid: p. 53. 65
Case Study: Radical Nationalism in the Ukrainian Fan Scene
Dynamo Kyiv, Karpaty Lviv and Metalist Kharkiv who display discriminatory symbols more often than others. For example, on August, 17th 2010 during the play-off match of the qualification to the Champions League between Dynamo Kyiv and Ajax Amsterdam the supporters of Dynamo displayed a banner with hanged emblem of Ajax, Celtic cross and anti-
Semitic slogan Juden Zeigen.74 Two weeks later, in a match between Karpaty Lviv and Galatasaray
Istanbul, the Karpaty supporters displayed banner in Turkish language reading Türk domuz uz akta
Avrupa’dan (Turkish pigs get out of Europe) and a celtic cross on it. As the match was played under jurisdiction of the UEFA, the incident was brought to the attention of their disciplinary committee by anti-racist campaigners and the club was subsequently punished with a fine.75 No reaction followed from the Ukrainian football officials.
The fans of Dynamo Kyiv participate in the autonomous nationalist movement and propagate their ideas at the terraces. One of the main forms of their activity also constitutes physical attacks on anti-racist activists and fans of Arsenal Kyiv who openly declare their views opposing racism and discrimination. One of the examples of their activity against ideological opponents happened on August 15, 2010 after the football match of Ukrainian Premier League between Arsenal Kyiv and Volyn Lutsk. Arsenal Kyiv fans faced the most severe armed attack from neo-Nazi groups.
On their way home after the match 30 Arsenal supporters were attacked by 50 neo-Nazis including fans of Dynamo Kyiv. The incident went beyond football clashes: the attackers were armed with knives and brass knuckles, shouting the slogans “Heil Hitler” and “White Power”.
One person was stabbed, other fans of Arsenal suffered multiple injuries.76 This case is not singular, clashes between football hooligans take place very often, but the neo-Nazi supporters of
74 Pankowski, ‘Hateful’: p. 57. 75 Ibid 76 East European Development Institute, Bulletin ‘In the Same Boat’ No 36 August 2010, retrieved on August 29, 2012 from http://www.eedi.org.ua/eng/index.htm 66
Case Study: Radical Nationalism in the Ukrainian Fan Scene
many clubs have unspoken rule to attack Arsenal fans with any type of weapons they can as they challenge the ideological dominance of the extreme right in Ukrainian football thus posing greater danger than so-called traditional enemies such as visible minorities.
The fans of Karpaty Lviv are known for their nationalist views as Western part of Ukraine has always been the stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism. Along the usual arsenal of neo-Nazi symbols, they also display flags and portraits of leaders of the controversial OUN-UPA active during the World War II. The fans and club administration usually reject the allegations of racism responding that they are just being ‘patriotic’ and respect the Ukrainian language, culture and history. Such statements could be valid in case the fans of Karpaty Lviv would not display discriminatory symbols which have nothing to do even with Ukraine itself such as portrait of
Benito Mussolini displayed at their main stand on August 10, 2010 or multiple Celtic crosses.77
The Lviv section of the autonomous nationalist movement is widely present at the terraces of
Karpaty Lviv and the fans openly express their support and display banners of the official radical nationalist party VO Svoboda. In Lviv, formerly a multicultural city with large Jewish community, anti-Semitist is currently widely spread among the supporters of VO Svoboda party and Karpaty
Lviv fans who display anti-Semitic symbols and slogans during the matches of their team.
Another football club deeply infiltrated by the radical nationalist organizations is Metalist
Kharkiv. The local neo-Nazi paramilitary organization ‘Patriot of Ukraine’, member of the
‘Social-Nationalist Assembly’ managed to create its own hooligan firm among Metalist supporters who call themselves ‘Social-Nationalist Syndicate’. This hooligan firm is often involved in violent attacks on foreigners and visible minorities in Kharkiv.
77 Pankowski, ‘Hateful’: p. 56. 67
Case Study: Radical Nationalism in the Ukrainian Fan Scene
In the South of Ukraine, Russian radical nationalist forces are active and enjoy support among the fans of Chernomorets Odesa. At the matches of this team fans often display flags of the
Russian empire which are commonly used by the extreme right wing movements in Russia.
Despite the sharp divide existing in Ukraine between East and West of the country in their political preferences, the radical nationalist football supporters employ the same arsenal of racist and neo-Nazi symbols throughout the country. The Celtic crosses, anti-Semitic slogans, racist chanting may be found equally in Lviv and Donetsk. This signifies the existence of a unified subcultural code accepted by active supporters throughout the country.
Both legal extreme right wing political organizations and informal neo-Nazi structures exert their influence in the Ukrainian fan scene and recruit their members at the football terraces. The anti-migrant rhetoric of VO Svoboda party found little support in society but became accepted among the active supporters in Ukraine. The changes that took place in Ukrainian football at the turn of the century when many players from different countries were invited to play in Ukrainian football clubs found strong opposition from the right-wing supporters. They were protesting against black players in the Ukrainian league, insulting them and imitating monkey sounds whenever a black footballer touched the ball.
The strong connection existing between the right wing political organizations and football fans was well illustrated in September 2010, when VO Svoboda party organized a demonstration
For Ukrainian Football demanding expulsion of ‘migrants’ and legionaries from the Ukrainian football, ‘racial purity of the Ukrainian football’ and other discriminatory and racist slogans. The demonstration gathered several thousands of people among including active supporters of several clubs, notably Dynamo Kyiv, Karpaty Lviv and Metalist Kharkiv and activists of VO Svoboda party who were brought to Kyiv from all over Ukraine. Banners with Celtic crosses as well as
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Case Study: Radical Nationalism in the Ukrainian Fan Scene
racist text banners were usual among the participants. The demonstration ended near the FFU building, where the vice-president of the FFU Borys Voskresenskyi came to the demonstrators promising to ‘take into account’ the demands of the demonstrators.78
Apart from overt racist and discriminatory abuse present at the stadiums, there are different forms exercised daily in Ukrainian public discourse. In 2006, then head coach of the Ukrainian national team Oleh Blokhin commented at the press conference that:
“The more Ukrainians there are playing in the national league, the more examples there are for the young generation, let them learn from Blokhin or Shevchenko and not some zumba-bumba whom they took off a tree, gave two bananas and now he plays in the Ukrainian league.”79
The statement did not cause any inconvenience for the Ukrainian FA and Blokhin never apologized for addressing black players in such a derogatory manner.
The players at the pitch may hear verbal abuse and racist banners, but they are still more protected than ethnic minority supporters. Despite the relatively large numbers of African and
Latin American players in the Ukrainian Premier League, the number of ethnic minority supporters is alarmingly low. Most of them are afraid to go to football matches as they can become victims of racist attacks by the football hooligans directly at the stadium.
A very characteristic example of the situation with racism and discrimination in Ukrainian football was revealed before the start of the UEFA Mens’ European football championship in
Poland and Ukraine in June 2012. BBC One has produced a program called Panorama. Euro
2012: Stadiums of Hate, which was broadcasted several weeks before the start of the event.80 The footage showed racist chanting, discriminatory banners and Hitler salutes during the matches in
78Pankowski, ‘Hateful’: p. 58. 79 Karon, T. Racism and Euro 2012: Football’s Ongoing Struggle. May 29, 2012 retrieved September 5, 2012 from http://keepingscore.blogs.time.com/2012/05/29/racism-and-euro-2012-footballs-ongoing-struggle/?iid=sp-article- mostpop1 80 BBC One, Euro 2012: Stadiums of Hate, May 2012 retrieved August 30th, 2012 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jk4vr 69
Case Study: Radical Nationalism in the Ukrainian Fan Scene
Poland and Ukraine. At one of the matches in Ukraine they filmed a group of Asian students being beaten by neo-Nazi hooligans right at the stands for nothing else than the color of their skin.
The footage was shocking, but the reaction of the local police and football authorities was even worse. They both denied the existence of racism in Ukrainian football and accused the BBC of making up the video to hurt the image of the country. The scandal received international attention and several days after the program was broadcasted the president of Ukraine in an interview downplayed the problem and assured that the police was closely watching the football hooligans.81Although no serious racist incidents indeed took place in Ukraine during the championship, it can be hardly attributed to the absence of racism in the Ukrainian fan scene.
The Ukrainian active supporters actually boycotted the tournament because of the police repressions not connected with their racist behavior. What is striking is that both football and government authorities still deny the very existence of the problem of racism and radical nationalism in Ukrainian football. Despite the multiple evidence presented by the anti-racist
NGOs active in the field such as the Polish association Never Again, Ukrainian East European
Development Institute and Football against Prejudices initiative, the Ukrainian football association took no active measures to tackle the problem.
The Ukrainian FA adopted the clauses rejecting racism and discrimination in football as ascribed by the UEFA, produced banners and encouraged the clubs to announce anti- discrimination message before every game of the UPL. These measures may give impression that the FA is trying to deal with the problem, but in practice this turns to be a mere lip service to the international UEFA standards. In practice the Disciplinary Committee (DC) never punished any
81 BBC News, Ukraine’s downplays EURO 2012 racism fears. May 31, 2012 retrieved August 30, 2012 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18286941 70
Case Study: Radical Nationalism in the Ukrainian Fan Scene
football club for racist behavior of its fans. The structure created to deal with problems in football including fan behavior incurred fines on football clubs for pyrotechnics, abusive chanting against the referee or opposing team, but never clearly recorded or punished any racist behavior of the football supporters. Nevertheless, there is progress in the attitude of the football authorities towards the problem. In October 2011 the decision of the Disciplinary Committee for the first time included a clear sentence that a club was punished precisely for racist behavior of its fans. In the current season the Ukrainian FA gives more significant attention to the problem as two decisions of the DC included clear indication about racist incidents recorded by the match delegates for which the clubs received fines. Thus, despite publicly denying the existence of the problem, the FA is trying to include some practices to tackle it in its internal operations.
The hosting of the UEFA Euro 2012 this year attracted significant attention to the social problems in Ukraine including racism and discrimination. The Polish association Never Again has coordinated the activities of Respect Diversity program financed by the UEFA to promote diversity and tolerance in Poland and Ukraine and create sustainable heritage in the hosting countries. The joint hosting of the tournament has shown the power of football to unite people across differences. The racist and radical nationalist elements in Ukrainian football should be taken seriously and dealt with employing most importantly educational activities and awareness raising campaigns. The repressive measures against all active supporters might make the situation even worse. Only joint activities of all stakeholders – football authorities, civil society and grass- root fan groups may tackle the problem effectively and make the global game more inclusive.
Racism does not originate in football neither can it be erased from society with the help of football alone. Racism and discrimination are social problems that have to be addressed in society in order to diminish the destructive consequences of the phenomena.
71
4 Conclusion
Ukraine is not the only state experiencing the problems of racism and discrimination in football and society. Arguably, it does not have the worst record of racist incidents and discriminatory abuse during the football matches either. Having relatively monoethnic society and generally tolerant attitudes towards minorities, Ukrainian society nevertheless has its football dominated by the radical nationalist groups. What makes the situation in Ukraine specific is weak development of civil society and democratic institutions to tackle the problem effectively. The ignorance of state and football authorities allows racist groups to propagate their ideas openly at the football stadiums. The absence of strong opposition among the fans themselves against racist dominance at the stadiums signifies the underdeveloped fan scene incapable of self-regulation.
The activity of anti-racist groups is developing, but incapable of tackling the problem at the national level.
72
Conclusion
Racism and discrimination emerged in the Ukrainian fan scene at the end of the 1990s as an imitation of the traditions of football hooliganism in Western Europe deeply infiltrated by the neo-Nazis. Nevertheless, what first appeared as an imitation later took its own form and developed in combination with the activity of the radical nationalist political organizations, speculating on the topics of migration and multiculturalism. Racism and radical nationalism became inseparable attributes of the Ukrainian fan culture, turning football stadiums into propaganda outlets for radical nationalist organizations and parties. The football matches became unsafe for ethnic minorities to attend, due to the risk of physical attacks by the neo-Nazis.
The football regulatory bodies are still at the stage of denying the very existence of the problem in Ukrainian football. They are lacking political will and effective instruments to tackle the problem. At the same time the measures taken by the police and state authorities are largely repressive and affect all the audience of the football matches ignoring the perpetrators and the crimes themselves. Thus, football stadiums became isolated places where the right wing radicals can freely propagate exclusive ideas and remain unchallenged. The incidents, otherwise inacceptable in Ukrainian society, are overlooked and ignored at the football stadiums.
There is nothing inherently racist, nationalist or divisive in the game of football itself. The rules of the game remain almost unchanged for more than a century, recognizing no differences other than skills and willingness to play. As any social practice, it can be instrumentalised and used to incite nationalist feelings, aggravate different divides existing in the society as well as unite and create more inclusive environments. Football should be regarded as a social tool and not an end in itself. Numerous examples in history show us how the game was used by authoritarian governments to consolidate their power or to the contrary to promote the symbolic model of a multicultural society, as did the triumphant French national team in 1998.
73
Conclusion
Football stadiums may be regarded as models of the respective societies in miniature, where the audience is divided in different boxes and stands according to the price of the seats and prestige, and where youth gather separately and set their passion freely every time their team scores. The changes in the composition of football audience at the stadiums reflected generational and social changes occurring in respective societies.
The new era of neoliberal capitalism and globalization processes has changed the face of the game almost unrecognizably. What used to be leisure and entertainment for the local communities has become televised and watched by millions of people worldwide. The football clubs turned into corporations and brand-names and players into shooting stars. The game was alienated and turned into mere relations of production and consumption. Still, it remains a passion for people who watch it, play it and support their teams whatever were their criteria for choosing one.
The globalization processes contributed to the rise in flows of people and money across nation-state borders, leagues and championships. The composition of teams became increasingly multicultural, featuring players literally from most countries of the world were people play football. The symbolism of the multicultural football teams contributed to the debates about more inclusive societies as well as faced the growth of conservative counter-movements. The resurgence of the right-wing populist parties and identity-driven movements across Europe has found its reflection at the football terraces. The youth ends of the stadiums appeared most receptive to radical nationalist ideas. Football has seen the most radical expressions of racism and discrimination directed at players, supporters and managers. European football has seen the establishment of a violent subculture with its own visual representation, ideological currents and rituals which travelled across borders and found new expressions.
74
Conclusion
Many countries in Europe have made a long way to eliminate racism and discrimination from their football grounds. The anti-racist advocacy and awareness rising public campaigns, protests from grass-root fan groups and efforts of the Football Against Racism in Europe network have all challenged bigotry and different forms of discrimination. Racist tendencies in the European football developed according to similar patterns, and the way to eliminate them is also similar. In every country, first everyone denies the existence of the problem, and only after recognizing its scale and scope the appropriate measures can be taken to fight racism in football. This problem is not a unique phenomenon existing only in football. The racism and intolerance existing in the society find their reflection at the football stadiums. Thus, it is not possible to fight racism and discrimination in isolation from the social context.
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Shekhovtsov, A. (2011). New Radical Right-Wing Parties in European Democracies: Determinants of Electoral Support. [Новые праворадикальные партии в европейских демократиях: причины электоральной поддержки].Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag. Spaaij, R. (2006). Understanding Football Hooliganism. Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA. Tsoukala, A. (2009). Football Hooliganism in Europe: Security and Civil Liberties in the Balance. Palgrave Macmillan. Turnbull, J. C., Raab, A., & Satterlee, T. (2008). The Global Game: Writers on Soccer.Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Umland, A. (2008). Die Andere Anomalie der Ukraine: ein Parlament ohne rechtsradikale Fraktionen. Ukraine-Analysen No. 41 , 7-10. United Nations. (2012). United Nations official web-site. Retrieved July 15, 2012, from United Nations at a glance: http://www.un.org/en/aboutun/index.shtml Vasili, P. (1998). The First Black Footballer:Arthur Wharton, 1865-1930 - An Absence of Memory. London: Frank Cass. Worldwide Religious News. (2002, April 14). Retrieved August 28, 2012, from Youths Attack Synagogue in Ukraine: http://wwrn.org/articles/7033/?&place=belarus- ukraine§ion=judaism
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Appendices
Appendix 1. The fan-zine of Dynamo Kyiv supporters, 1998.
79
Appendices
Appendix 2. Photo of a swastika flag at Dynamo Kyiv vsKarpatyLviv match on August, 19 2007.
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Pavlo Klymenko [email protected] Kyiv, Ukraine tel: +38 093 4025725
Education:
10.2010 – 10.2012 Erasmus Mundus Master‟s Program “Global Studies – A European Perspective”, University of Leipzig, University of Vienna. Erasmus Mundus Scholarship holder. 09.2005 – 06.2010 MA honors degree, Borys Hrynchenko Kyiv University. Major: Teacher of English and French languages, world literature.
Work Experience:
2006 – 2009 Civil Society Problems Research Centre, Analyst (Kyiv, Ukraine)
Voluntary work experience:
2008 – … „Football Against Prejudices‟ Initiative, member of Football Against Racism in Europe network (FARE), East-Europe Monitoring Center 2008 Coordinator of the Ukrainian delegation at the 5th European Social Forum. 2006 Ukrainian Social Forum, Member of the Organizing Committee. 2005 Student Council of the University.
List of publications:
Klymenko, P. Ukraine monitoring, in Hateful. Monitoring racism, discrimination and hate crime in Polish and Ukrainian football. ed. by Rafal Pankowski. 2011.
Klymenko, P./Lipphardt, G./ Vernyk, O.: Strange lands and long ways home. The forced evacuation of the Kyiv Jewish community to Siberia and the Ural Mountains in the summer of 1941 in: Geschichtswerkstatt Europa, 01.06.2010.
Language skills:
Ukrainian – native; Russian – native; English – fluent; French – good; German – basic.